Practices of LookingAn lntroduetion to Visua{ Culture

Third Edition

Marita SturkenNEW YORK UNIVERSITY

Lisa CartwrightUNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO

New York OxfordOXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Scientific Lool<i ng,Looking at Science

I-f ^

fris microscopic image, froma20l4 Science Neu;s article, depicts lymphocytes

7 f, cells) to which researchers have introduced a virus, activating the cells toperform an immune response against cancer.r The image shows something thatcannot be seen by the human eye and which, at the time of this article, was largely

experimental: the introduction of viruses into cells, intended to prompt the body

to fight its own cancer. The image is enhanced and colorized to

make the lymphocytes, described as "designer" T cells, appear Frc. e.l

as lively golden orbs, and the cancer pale and dull. The article's Two T cells (orange) attack a

language draws on meraphors of both design ("designer" is a ;,.1T::r:Te) (scanningelec-

term more commonly preceding jeans, not T cells) and battle

Readers are encouraged to

look forward to a time when

experimental virotherapies

will "redesign" our bodies

at the cellular level, pro-

voking our bodies to fight

cancer from within.

With its enhanced image

and new outlook on the virus

as a positive cancer-fighting

agent, this story is an exam-

ple of how science is con-

stituted through changing

social and cultural frame-

works. How we configure

I ttt

Barsalou, David. "Deconstructing Lichtenstein." https://www.facebook'com/david.barsalouh'

Baudrillard, )ean. Simulacra and Simulation, Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University

of Michigan Press, t994.Benhabib, Seyla. "Feminism and Postmodernism: An Uneasy Alliance." ln Feminist Contentions:

A philosophical Exchange, edlted by Seyla Benhabib,,ludith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy

Fraser, t-t5. NewYork: Routledge, r994.

Cahoone, Lawrence. From Modernismto Postmodernism: An Anthology. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, r996.

Colds, Santiago . Poslmodernity in Latin America: The Argentine Paradigm. Durham, NC: Duke Uni-

versity Press, t994.Colamina, Beatriz. Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press, r 996.Deleuze, Cill.t, ,nd F6lix Cuattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert

Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, [t977]

r 983.Oeleuze, Cilles, and Fdlix Guattari. AThousand Plateaus: Schizophrenia and Capitalism. Translated by

Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, r987.

Docherty, Thomas, ed. Postmodernism: A Reader. New York: columbia University Press, t993,

Dyer, Richard. Pastiche. NewYork: Routledge, zoo7.

Friedberg, Anne. Window Shopping Cinema and the Postmodern Berkeley: University of California

Press, t 993.Foster, Hal. The Art-Architecture Complex. London: Verso, zott.Hall, Stuart. "On Postmodernism and Articulation: An lnterview with Stuart Hall." ln Stuart Hall:

Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, t3t-5o. New

York: Routledge, r995.H arvey, David. Thi Condition of Postmodernity: An lnquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford,

U.l(.: Blackwell, t 99o.Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge, MA: Han

vard University Press, t997.

Hutcheon, Linda.The Politics of Poslmodernism. znd ed. New York: Routledge, [t989] zooz.

Huyssen, Andreas. Afi.er the Creat Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington:

lndiana University Press, t986.

Jameson, Fredric. Poslmodernism, or, The CulNural Logic of Lale CapiNalism. Durham, NC: Duke Uni-

versity Press, t 99t .

Jencks, Charles . The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. New York: Rizzoli,'t984.

]encks, Charles . The New Paradigm in Architecture: The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. New

Haven, CT: Yale University Press, zooz.

Jencks, Charles . The Story of Post,Modernism: Five Decades of lhe tronic, lconic and Critical in Archilec-

ture. Hoboken, NJ: WileY, zorz.Lyotard,Jean-Frangois. Postmodernism:ARepofionKnowledge.TranslatedbyCeoffBenningtonand

Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, t984.

Martin, Lesley A., ed. Nikki s. Lee: Projects. Essay by Russell Ferguson. ostfildern-Ruit, cermany:

Hatje Cantz, zoot.Martin, Reinhold. IJtopia's Ghost: Architeclure and Postmodernism, Again. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, zoto.McRobbie, Angela. Postmodernism and Popular Culture' New York: Routledge, t994'

Nicholson, Linda. Feminismf Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, zor3.petit, Emmanuel. trony: Or, the Self-Oitical Opacity of Postmodern Architectura. New Haven, CT: Yale

University Press, zot3.Rault, .f asmine. Eileen Gray and the Design of sapphic Modernity: staying In. Burlington, w: Ashgate,

201 l.Reckitt, Helena . Art and Feminism. London: Phaidon, zorz.

Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven lzenour. Learningfrom LasVegas: The Forgotten

Symbolism of Architectural Form. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, t97z; rev. ed., t977'

Wallis, Brian, ed. Art Afier Modernism: Rethinking Representation. New York: New Museum, t984.

336 |POSTMODERNTSM: IRONY, PARODY, AND PASTICHE

the loft of artist Robert Rauschenberg, and then in t967 it was

reproduced in the Neu.r YorkTimes, in the papers first-ever pub-

lishing of a nude image. ln this work we see the classical subject

of art, the female nude, rendered in a tonal field composed of

tiny electronic symbols for transistors and resistors. Although

the Boeing and Bell Labs cornputer technicians were interested

in innovation of technology, they clearly also engaged in cultural

iconography and social meanings about the human body.

HC. 9.3

Studies in Perception l, laser printaft er a com puter-generated

image, "Studies in Perception I,"

by Leon Harmon and Ken l(nowl-

Ion,1gg7, original print produced

int967, reproduction in r997(laser print)

As computers have become more adept at processing data and rendering itgraphically, the role of visuality in the sciences, health, and medicine has become

more quantitative and less qualitative. Tension rests between more strongly qualita-

tive forms, such as the gray-scale analog photograph, and quantitatively based image

output, such as the digital photograph, which is composed of measurable units:

pixels. lndeed, it has been said that the 2010s has been an era of "the quantified self"

due to the popularity of activity-tracking devices used for self-health monitoring.a

Late twentieth-century medical images such as sonograms and MRls were widely

received by patients and doctors alike with a sense of wonder and curiosity and were

regarded as legible mainly to physicians and technicians. These kinds of images are

now familiar to us, appearing more and more routinely among the personal medical

records that we understand to represent our most intimate states of being. Num-

bers and charts are increasingly experienced as personal, not impersonal, forms;we

respond to them in emotional ways. Consider the expecting parent's "first sono-

gram," a specialized scientific image of the developing fetus in utero. Though hardly

a photograph (the sonogram is a graphic rendering of sound wave measurements),

the image is nonetheless regarded and treasured like a family photograph.

Whereas in the twentieth century the public tended to consume more images

than it produced, today almost everyone is an image producer and knows about

SCIENTIFIC LOOKINC, LOOKINC AT SCIENCE I rrs

disease, treatment, and our bodies changes with shifts in the epistemic frameworks

and practices through which we experience the world. ln the digital era, the individual

is seen as the most impoftant agent in human experience. For those in postindustrial

capitalist societies, medicine is a market culture driven by design innovation, no less so

than architecture and fashion. Researchers redesign our cells so our bodies may attack

cancer for us, from within. The individual biomedical consumer's cells are enlisted

with agency at the level of the molecular. Many years ago the American breast cancer

physician and activist Dr. Susan Love suggested thatthere is the need and the potential

to rethink cancer therapies from the ground up.2 Surgery, radiation, and chemother-

apy, the three techniques of the twentieth century, have helped immensely, but they

"slash, burn, and poison" the whole body. Perhaps, she suggested, there might be a

way to view cancer cells not as foreign enemies to be killed (and with them, poten-

tially, the rest of the body), but as citizens capable of being rehabilitated.3 This image

of viral therapy experimentation indicates a new epistemic model for cancer and the

individual human subject, body, and cell potentially to be enlisted as active agents in

its biomedical treatment.

Since the digital turn, imaging has played an increasingly important role as a

form of acquiring and representing data in fields that we previously did not asso-

ciate with media culture-fields in the life sciences and physical sciences, as well

as the social sciences. ln the early decades of computing (the I950s through the

I970s), screen image and data output were primarily textual. But at the same time,

extensive experimentation was conducted around the use of computers to render

graphic imaging that would have important implications for how we understand

and render life in the visual culture of science and medicine.

Consider Boeing Man, an image also known as First Man. This is a computer wire-

frame drawing produced in 1964 by William Fetter, then the art director at Boeing, a

leading aerospace company. Fetter used an early Cerber Plotter to

nc. e.2 render this figure, one of the first computer renderings of a human

William Fetter/Boeing Company, body, which was a part of an airplane cockpit design. CompareBoeingMan (aka Firsi Man)'.,t964

this image to Leon Harmon and Ken Knowlton's computer-ren-(digital computer rendering) -"'- ""-o- -- '

dered Studies in Perception I (1967). Knowlton is a computer

scientist who worked at Bell Labs in the 1960s

and 1970s, a period when the company sup-

ported experimentation by scientists working

in collaboration with artists to innovate visual

technology. Knowlton's most famous collab-

orations were with the artist Stan VanDerBeek,

developing a computer animation program. This

print of a female nude rendered in a computer

graphics program was originally produced as an

office prank but was subsequently featured in a

press conference on art and technology held at

338 |SCIENTIFIC LOOKINC. LOOKINC AT SCIENCE

the potential for image manipulation and cross-contextual use. We may trust that

experts are behind images like the enhanced micrograph that opens this chapter

and that therefore the knowledge conveyed is objective and trustworthy. But we

also know that images are partial data and require reflexive consideration. Whether

we consider it as expert or novice, we must approach any lab image with careful

analytic skepticism concerning its apparent truths, as what images show is always

partial and incomplete. The dividing line between science and culture is neither

sharp norstable overtime. Scientists and medical professionals live in culture;theirlaboratory and clinical interpretations are never fully immune from politics, religion,

taste, class, and sexual pleasure. Bodies change, as do our ideas about how they

work, why they become ill, how they are classified and valued, and how best to

know about and care for them.

ln this chapter we propose that scientific, technical, and informational images

and looking practices are no less historically and culturally situated than are other

images and media. We take up scientific and technical imaging systems, practices,

and cultures to consider an array of questions: How have science and medicine been

informed by classifications of difference and dominant ideas about what constitutes

health and the normal and pathological body and mind? How have professional

imaging and looking practices helped to constitute and to change dominant epis-

temic notions about physical and mental difference and pathology? How have image-

making practices and visuality changed in different branches of science and medicine

during modernity and postmodernity? How have imaging technologies informed clin-

ical medicine and public health for researchers, clinicians, patients, and caregivers?

We show in this chapter that although scientific visualization practices are

highly specialized, these practices are not isolated from other cultural contexts.

Even when data and image production and looking practices are performed by

machines, these processes are shaped by human feelings, knowledge, and expe-

rience. One's cultural orientations and training in everyday life cannot be checked

at the lab door, even with the best intentions of impartiality and objectivity. Wepresent the idea, supported by science and technology studies, visual culture, and

the history of medicine, that science and medicine are not value-free domains.

Opening Up the Body to the EmpiricalMedical CazeTo understand the place of images in biomedicine and science, it is helpful to consider

images from the pre-history of medicine. The use of images and looking, both to know

the body and to improve medical treatment, dates back to antiquity. For instance, the

Creeks depicted various interventions by physicians in illuminated manuscripts. ln

Greece, the Empiric School of Thought relied on observation and comparative anal-

ogy: one needed to observe and record illness and its treatments to know how to

administer care. Greek medical practitioners were unified in the view that illness was

340 |SCIENTIFIC LOOKINC, LOOKINC AT SCIENCE

caused not by divine powers but by natural

forces, The ancient Hippocratic Corpus, a

collection of sixty medical works, in the sec-

tion titled The Art, argues that medicine is

a special set of skills involving techne-that

is, art or craft. Drawing held a special place

as a technical practice. Drawing was used

to document technique, so that medicine

could be practiced based on prior example.

Throughout history, the human body

has been subject to brutal injury in war, and

this has been a site for the construction of

medical knowledge. The "wound man" is a

rather startling type of illustration used in fif-

teenth- and sixteenth-century manuscripts

to map typical locations of battle wounds.

Anotherversion was printed in the Fasciculo

de medicina, a work by Cerman physician

Johannes de Ketham that is the earliest

extant printed book to include anatomical

illustrations. The "wound man"'is iconic in the sense that as a

symbol it has been widely reproduced and recognized in different

versions. lt is also iconic in Peirce's sense, in that the image looks

like a body. lndeed, it is a violently wounded body depicting all

manner of injuries-though with their weapons, impossibly, still in place. Although

we may see this as a pictorial image, and indeed an iconographic one, this particular

"wound man" is in fact also a spatial index, providing a diagram of common locations

of physical battle injuries.

Interestingly, the chest is cut open and the flesh peeled back. What do we make

of the cut-open body? "Looking within" is a common trope for getting at hidden

truths, whether we identify truth with an abstraction such as "the soul" or a hidden

physical structure that is symbolic, such as the brain or the heart. The concept of

bodily truth was a topic of particular interest to French philosopher Michel Foucault.

ln The Birth of the Clinic, he discusses the emergence of the concept of looking

inside the body as a privileged form of medical knowledge in the late eighteenth cen-

tury. This was the time of the Enlightenment, when the Declaration of the Rights of

Man and of the Citizen was introduced, and along with it humanistic hospital-based

medical teaching, research, and clinical practice. Foucault explains that traditional

methods of diagnosis before this time involved reading the body's surface for illness

symptoms and observing the body by hand and by eye, empirically-through sight

and touch. With the rise of anatomical dissection during this time, as practiced by

researchers such as the descriptive anatomist Marie-Frangois Xavier Bichat, a change

FIG. 9.4

The "wound man" from an

En glish anatomical treatise,

sixteenth century

SCIENTIFIC LOOKINC, LOOKINC AT SCIENCE I r+t

took place in processes of inquiry and interpretation. Whereas previously physicians

palpated or touched the body to gain knowledge of its interior, or listened with

scopes, now physicians sought empirical evidence by looking inside the body, not

only cutting it open to see but also using tools to seek out aspects that could not

be discerned directly by hand or by eye. Bichat, who did not trust microscopes,

opened up cadavers and studied their interior structures, proposing on the basis of

his observations that tissues and membranes, and not organs, were the basic units

of life. By opening up and looking inside dead bodies, he found a new way of under-

standing and classifying the body as a system. A new way of looking and knowing

came to prominence-one that involved not just seeing directly but also defining

seeing itself as something that required instruments.

Medical visuality from this period forward began to involve the use of more

and more instruments to measure and to enhance, mediate, and correct human

observation. ln Chapter 3 we discussed Foucault's interpretation of the panopticon

prison as a structure that introduced the surveillant gaze. What was important was

not the actual activity of seeing, but the distribution of the power of vision across

different agents, including the inmate, who internalized the gaze of the guard, and

the prison structure itself, which orchestrated the distribution of power. In Enlight-

enment medicine, Foucault saw a different kind of gaze than this panoptic one-a"medical gaze" that elicits hidden truths about life by looking inside dead bodies,

through which one could discern, paradoxically, the structure of the living system.

Whereas the visualization of the body in the wound maps offered a diagram for

pedagogical purposes, Bichat, according to Foucault, aimed to reveal the true orga-

nization of things: he "rediscovers not the geography of the body, but the order

of classifications."5 A classification system, Foucault notes, is not a reflection of

objective truth about the order of nature, but a social system that both creates and

reinforces systems of knowledge and power in its given episteme.6

ln the rise of the natural sciences in the nineteenth century and in biomedicine

today, vision is understood as the primary avenue to knowledge, and sight is privileged

over the other senses. Foucault identifies the introduction of a new (clinical) regime ofknowledge in which vision plays a distinctive role in the regard to the living body as

a system ("the order of things"). However, vision can play different roles in contem-

poraneous regimes of truth, and in privileging vision, instruments and technologies

of seeing become even more important. The looking Foucault describes is crucially

linked to other activities that give meaning to what vision uncovers: experimenting,

measuring, analyzing, and ordering, for example. The paradox of the clinical gaze and

its legacy is that vision may predominate, but it is nonetheless dependent on other

sensory and cognitive processes, as well as upon tools and instruments designed to

regulate, check, correct, and augment our visual capacities. Foucault's contribution

was the linking of seeing to a broader set of systems of seeing as knowing, including

imaging devices and tools of measurement. The seen body was understood to be

in motion, an interrelationship of physiological systems and not a set of discrete,

342 |SCIENTIFIC LOOKINC. LOOKINC AT SCIENCE

fixed anatomical parts. Knowledge through seeing was a

modality that required technologies to implement and cor-

rect sight, and this demand for visual technologies became

more pronounced as we moved into the digital age.

Medicine as Spectacle: TheAnatomical and Surgical TheaterDuring the Renaissance, artists took a renewed interest

in classical anatomy. As we noted in Chapter 4, during

the Renaissance art and science converged. As the art

historian Erwin Panofsky wrote, the emergence of the

science of anatomy (with its aim to understand the

body's interior scientifically) was integral to Renaissance

art. Leonardo da Vinci (1452- I5l9) is emblematic of the

Renaissance artist's engagement with science and medi-

cine. Forthis reason, Leonardo, a contemporary journalof digital

art and science, bears his name.

FIG. 9.5

Leonardo da Vinci, Vitruvian Man,

c. 1487 (pen and inkwash over

metalpoint on paper)

scrENTrFrc LooKrNc, LooKrNc nr s.,rtcr | 343

Da Vinci drew this famous sketch of the human figure, known as Vitruuian

Man,in his notebook in I48{.7 He conelated the proportions of the human body

with geometry laws, basing his idea on the third volume ol De Architectura, a

ten-volume treatise written by the Roman architect Marcus Vitruvius Pollio around

l5 BCE. Vitruvius related the laws of geometry to forms found in nature and, in

this third volume, to ideal human proportions. ln depicting the figure within a

circle and a square, da Vinci conveys the idea that the body exists within both the

material realm (symbolized by the square) and the spiritual realm (represented by

the circle). Da Vinci, along with others during his time, took the metaphysical view

that the human body is not simply designed on the same principles that govern

the natural world; man is, in fact, a microcosm of the world. Whereas Vitruvius

suggested that human form follows the laws of nature, da Vinci placed man at the

epicenter. Vitruuian Man has been reproduced widely in science and medicine,

where typically it has symbolized not only the interrelationship of the human body,

mathematical laws, and nature but also the primacy of man. The enduring status

of Leonardo's Vitruvian Man as signifier of man's power in the universe is evident

in its use, in 1973, by the art department of NASA (the U.S. National Aeronautics

and Space Administration) in their design for commemorative patches given to

astronauts who had completed the Skylab Expedition ll spacewalk. The icon was

selected to represent the special focus of this mission on medical knowledge. The

designers made modifications to the genital area of the original drawing in order to

make it more "family friendly." They also designed a patch to give to the wives of

the astronauts, re-rendering the body with female attributes.

Frc. e.6 Panofsky noted that as the practice of anatomy became estab-

vitruvian Man on NASA skylab lished, "painter-anatomists" were increasingly present at autopsies

::':' :::'i::1-1":::l:n l; i'ffiil:1",ltr::l1:fi::';i:ii#: THil'#i;;:1duced to the practice through the anatomist Marcantonio della

Tone. Thus, his anatomical drawings were based on cadavers as well as live models.

His private notebooks contain drawings of a human fetus inside what appears to be a

dissected womb. The fetus drawings suggest a keen interest in the question of how

human regeneration unfolds inside the living female body, an inquiry dating back to

the Creek philosopher Aristotle that would eventually give rise to

disciplines including embryology, genetics, and gynecology and

obstetrics.e Leonardo's fetus is drawn as if from a uterine dissec-

tion. Though it is likely to have been derived from a composite

of sources (which may have included animal models), this

image of living process effectively suggests death, in that

the body is sliced open.

The sense that one can better understand the living

body by cutting into it, physically or virtually, expos-

ing its interior appearance and processes for empirical

visual inspection, has remained strong in medicine and

science. As we discuss later in this chapter, the devel-

opment of modern imaging techniques, such as X ray,

CT, and MRI, extended this direction of inquiry by pro-

moting methods for seeing the living body in ways pre-

viously available only through the study of cadavers.

Prior to these scientific imaging modalities, the prac-

tice of actually seeing the body's interior was limited

to observation during surgery or anatomical dissection.

Jos6 van Dijck proposes that these imaging practices,

from anatomy to X ray to endoscopy to digital scanning,

FIG.9.2

Leonardo da Vinci, Views of a

Fetus in the Womb, c. r 5r o-r 5 r 2

":'.'::t..

344 |

SCIENTIFIC LOOKINC, LOOKINC AT SCIENCE

construct the body as a transparent entity, render-

ing life itself visible. Yet through the process of

looking, knowledge about the body only becomes

more confusingly complex. To represent more and

more detail at ever-more-refined scales can provide

more data than we can process and interpret.r0 To

look engenders knowledge, but also produces not

only more data but also a desire for technology

devoted to scrutinizing and further analysis. Look-

ing engenders wonder not only because we know

more when we look, but because what we see may

engender more questions rather than certainty.

Wonder and this engagement in science as a mode of tanta-

lizing inquiry have long motivated the popular reception of sci-

entific and medical looking practices. ln early modern society,

dissections (of animals and humans) were performed not only

FlG. 9.8

The Anatomy Theater at Leiden,

drawn by Johannes Woudanusand engraved by Willem van

Swanenburg, t6to

scrENTrFrc LooKrNc, LooKrNc n, t.,u^.u | 345

for medical and scientific audiences, but also for privileged members of the public

as spectators. From the sixteenth century onward, anatomy theaters were a form of

spectacle through which anatomists educated and entertained their audiences of col-

leagues, students, and elite lay spectators. Autopsy was presented as an awe-inspir-

ing process, offering a view into the mysterious borderland between life and death.

The Leiden anatomy theater in the Netherlands, built in 1596, was an important

site for the practice of anatomy as theater. ln this print, the theater is represented

with a dissection underway at the central table, surrounded by animal skeletons

and onlookers. At the outermost ring, men and women in street clothes appear to

be at leisure, conversing in groups. A dog has wandered in off the street. The Leiden

anatomy theater was a popular site for visitors, so much so that guidebooks about

its anatomical specimen collection were created in the late 1600s. lts theater and

Hall of Anatomy included displays of skeletons conveying moral messages about

the deceased, most of whom were criminals and whose bodies the physicians had

dissected in the theater. Such moralizing exhibits were justified by the status of

these corpses as the bodies of mere criminals, understood as human subjects who

did not deserve privacy.r I Van Dijck notes that it was the anatomist, rather than the

cadaver, who was the actor and focal point of the anatomical theater.12

A fascination with the dead body and an association of morbidity with crime

would become a central feature of the visual spectacle of modernity. As historian

Vanessa Schwartz writes, the Paris morgue became the site of spectacular displays

in the late nineteenth century when certain types of dead bodies, in particular those

of children and women who drowned in the Seine River, were put on display. Hun-

dreds of thousands of Parisians came to see these corpses as if the morgue were a

kind of free theater. Morgue personnel photographed the unidentified, decompos-

ing bodies, but they also put unidentified bodies on display for public view in the

exhibition room, creating an experience that commentators compared to that of

'lF

rr/

,rffi*,#tn

viewing goods in department store windows. As Schwartz notes:

"To many observers, the morgue simply satisfied and reinforced

the desire to look. . . . One newspaper put it simply: 'people go

to the morgue to see."'r3 We are reminded of Weegee's photo-

graph,The First Murder, discussed in Chapter I (Fig. I.l). When

the morgue spectacle became too infamous, the Paris police dis-

continued public viewing, but not before morgue officials cre-

ated wax replicas to preserve the form of decomposing corpses, a

practice that would give rise to the city's wax museums.

This wax figure was cast from the face of a young woman

believed to have committed suicide by drowning in the Seine. Visual

culture scholar Mark Sandberg notes that wax acquired a reputa-

tion as a form of recording, substituting for the more perishable

human body.te This particular cast, which became known as l'ln-

connue de la Seine (The Unknown Woman of the Seine), gained

great popularity. lt was reproduced and used as a model for head

studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where students were encour-

aged to copy the enigmatic facial expression. Cheap plaster copies could be found in

stores near the school.rs In beautician training schools, replicas of the drowned wom-

an's face were used as a template on which to practice applying makeup.

The desire to look into and upon the body was also a part of the fascination

with the emerging practice of surgery in the late nineteenth century. One of the

most famous nineteenth-century American realist paintings is Thomas Eakins's

Frc. e. r0 The Qross Clinic ( I875). The painting depicts Dr. Samuel Gross

Thomas Eakins, poftraitof Dr. at age seventy in a fancy black coat, presiding over a surgical

Samuel D. Gross (The Gross Clinic), theater at Jefferson Medical College. Dr. Gross is at the centerr875 (oilon canvas' 8'x 6'6")

of the composition. He is brightly lit, surrounded by assistants

and others who watch from the shadowy background.

But the body under surgical intervention draws our

attention. Eakins is a key figure in nineteenth-century

realism. The painting has been often admired for its

realistic depiction of the surgical theater. At the time,

the painting was considered to be shocking (Cross's

bloodied right hand holds a scalpel); it was rejected

for the I876 Centennial Exhibition. It has been ana-

lyzed since from many perspectives, including a psy-

choanalytic one that considers the painting's dynamic

of gazes.r6 The woman seated on the left, who may

be a relative or the mother of the patient, recoils from

the scene, hiding her face much like the woman in

Weegee's photograph (Fig. I . l). The art historian

Michael Fried proposes that this figure is a surrogate

346 |SCIENTIFIC LOOKINC, TOOKINC AT SCIENCE

FIG. 9.9

llnconnue de la Seine (The

Unknown \Voman of the Seine),

nineteenth-century wax plaster

mortuary mask

.,l;,iiljrl##"

..s

^*rffi{.d\

:'l{t.t

1

for the nonmedical viewer who may

want to look in fascination but is over-

come by the gory spectacle.rT Her atti-

tude contrasts with that of the clerk, who

calmly takes notes, and the students,

who eagerly dive into the procedure,

their hands on the femur (they are treat-

ing a bone infection in the anesthetized

young man). The painting thus captures

not only the look and feel of the surgical

theater of the mid-nineteenth century, a

sight rarely witnessed by nonprofessionals, but also the medical

field of the gaze, displaying the dynamics of revulsion and fasci-

nation at play in this place and time in Western medical history.

A second painting, The Agnew Clinic, painted by Eakins in

FlG. 9. r l

Thomas Eakins, The Agnew Clinic,

r889 (oil on canvas,84/rxtt8")

scrENrFrc LooKrNG, LooKtNc nr t.,ttcr | 347

1889, shows a changed field of lhe gaze. The surgical theater is more brightly lit than

the theater in the 1875 painting. Whereas in the older painting the surgeons appeared to

be operating in their street clothes (formal black frock coats), in this painting they wear

white lab coats. And whereas the earlier painting depicts a surgery on a young male

patient, in this work the patient on the operating table is a young woman, unconscious

with her breast exposed. The lone conscious female figure in this painting is a nurse. In

contrast to the emotional gaze of the woman in the Cross Clinic painting, the nurse's

gazeis direct and calm in its contemplation of the female patient. With her hair hygien-

ically bundled under a starched white cap and her clean white apron, the nurse stands

ready to assist, the image of the female "helping" professions. Changes to lighting,

demeanor, and garments suggest compliance with the methods of antiseptic surgery

that had been introduced by the British physician Joseph Lister in the interim between

these two works. Comparison of the paintings shows us that the introduction of new

methods entailed not only a new, more orderly and bright appearance of the clinic, but

also a new set of dynamics of power, a newly hygienic field of the surgical gaze.ts

Microscopy was introduced in the seventeenth century, photography in the early

nineteenth century, and X-ray imaging in 1895, the same year that the motion picture

cinema was introduced. As we will discuss further, in the twentieth century a wide

array of scientific imaging technologies was introduced. With each technology, the

place of looking and images in science changed. Yet the anatomical and surgical the-

ater and the idea of medical display have retained a powerful place in the public imag-

inary. We see the legacy of this theatricality in Cunther von Hagens's Body Worlds, a

vast collection of preserved human cadavers that has been exhibited in coliseums and

museums around the world since the late 1990s, drawing large audiences.

With more than 37 million visitors to date, the Body Worlds exhibitions rank

among the world's most popular mass spectacles. Gunther von Hagens is the noto-

rious director of the project and the lnstitute for Plastination in Germany, where

human cadavers are specially preserved

and prepared for display. Von Hagens

assumes the dual role of scientist and

artist, fashioning himself in the image

of the late German artist Joseph Beuys

(he has been refened to as "the cadaver

Beuys"l.te h 2002, Von Hagens per-

formed a public dissection in London,

thus situating his practice quite explic-

itly in the tradition of the public ana-

tomical theater. The cadavers that heFlG. 9. r 2

From Cunther von Hagens's

"Body Worlds" exhibition at CAM

show room on November 6, zo't3,

in Bologna, ltaly

SCIENTIFIC LOOKINC, LOOKINC AT SCIENCE

has displayed in more than fifty Body

Worlds exhibitions around the world, beginning in Tokyo in I995,

were treated with a preservative process (plastination) and then art-

fully arranged in various poses and groupings intended to generate a

sense ofwonder about the human body and the science of anatomy

to a broad nonspecialist audience. The project has been highly controversial. Von

Hagens has been accused, for example, of using the cadavers of Chinese prisoners, a

charge that his organization denies.2o It is possible to will one's body to the organi-

zation (his website even explains how to do this). ln 2009, a French judge ruled that

exhibiting human remains is a violation of the respect owed to the dead and ordered

the closure of Our Body: The Universe Within, an exhibition mounted by a competitor

of the von Hagens Body Worlds brand. ln addition to raising ethical questions about

the public display of human remains and the provenance of corpses, these exhibitions

have in some cases affirmed traditional gender stereotypes, with, for example, male

figures posed in tableaus that are active and social, such as a playing soccer, and

female figures shown in traditionally feminine states, such as pregnancy. The figures

are posed with layers of flesh pulled back to reveal organs, nerves, blood vessels, and

muscle tissue. Some of the tableaus have referenced well-known art historical images.

Body Worlds and projects like it are disturbing and interesting not only because

they involve the transformation and display of actual bodies, but also because they

cross categories of art and science display. As Josd van Dijck notes, plastination

and related methods of body preservation and display transgress the boundaries

between body and model, organic and synthetic, object and representation, fake

and real, authentic and copy, and human and posthuman.2r The visual culture

scholar Cathy Hannabach further interprets the phenomenon of human remains

display in the context of a queer biopolitics that informs not only popular culture

but also the medical and scientific discourses with which these practices are inter-

twined.22 The popular is not a reduction or perversion of scientific and medical

knowledge. Rather, science, medicine, and the popular intersect and inform one

another in complex ways. As we saw in the Eakins paintings, which reveal much

about the intimate dynamics of a surgical setting, medicine and science are not

immune from the emotional, political, and sexual dynamics of looking.

348 |

Evidence, Classification, and ldentificationPhotographic images play an important role as evidence in science, medicine,

and law. Photography bears the legacy of positivism, the philosophical belief that

true and valid knowledge about the world is derived from the objective scientific

method, Positivism was advanced by the French philosopher Auguste Comte in

the mid-nineteenth century, at about the same time that photography gained pop-

ularity. The theory gained ground in the twentieth century, informing a broader

ideology in which thinkers questioned the reliability of subjective reasoning and

the soundness of philosophical and spiritual metaphysics as means of knowing and

explaining the world. A positivist approach is embraced by practitioners who favor

objective study and measurement as means of perceiving reality over the more sub-jective orientation of empirical looking. Recall that Bichat rejected the microscope,

trusting his direct vision over the view provided through an optical instrument. The

microscope may be regarded, in this example, as an instrument Iinked to objec-

tivity, insofar as it is understood to enhance and correct vision, or to make visible

what the eye alone cannot see. The photographic camera was regarded by many, in

the positivist view, as a similarly useful tool for mechanically observing, measuring,

and studying the real world in a manner that could check, balance, or correct poten-

tial errors introduced by the subjective aspects of human empirical perception.

The notion of photographic truth, as we discussed in Chapter l, hinges on the

idea that the camera is an objidtive device for capturing reality and that it can render

this objectivity despite the subjective vision of the person using the camera. The pho-

tographic image is thus, in its more positivist uses and contexts, regarded as an entity

that is less burdened with the intentions of its maker than, for example, hand-rendered

drawings. ln this view, photography is tied to the drive to reveal facts and truths

that the human senses alone are not equipped to perceive. Yet, as we have shown

throughout this book, photographic images are nonetheless cultural and social arti-

facts. Despite its status as a black-boxed technology (one that hides away its mecha-

nisms and design choices in a single, closed unit), the camera requires its user to make

subjective and culturally informed decisions. Framing, composition, lighting, contex-

tual display, and captioning are a few of the aspects of photography that involve active

decision-making. The photograph has the capacity to evoke wonder and make visible

things that are otherwise difficult to see. This is done, in some cases, by freezingin

time events that are so fleeting that they are missed by the unaided eye (a technique

used in physiology, for example), by magnifying objects to reveal their minute struc-

tures (as photomicroscopy does), by telescopically making objects appear closer (as in

astronomy), or by rendering nonoptical events into visual artifacts (rendering images

out of data from sonar wave measurements, for example). Photographs may be expe-

rienced as both magical and truthful, offering us surprising new views of reality and

nature and enhancing and extending our sense of power through visuality.

When it emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, photography was immedi-

ately seen as a powerful medium for use in science and medicine. lt was taken up

scrrruirrrc LooKrNc, LooKrNc nt sc't*ce I 349

by scientists in laboratories and in the field and by physicians in medical hospitals

and clinics and was integrated into existing medical optical devices. Photographs in

these contexts provided visual records of phenomena and experiments. They were

used to document diseases, perform diagnoses, and record and graphically repre-

sent scientific data. ln modernity, the idea of seeing farther and better, beyond the

capacity of the unaided human eye, had tremendous currency; in modern thought,

to see is to know. Every aspect of the physical world was subject to this expanded

model of the gaze, which included both the empirical approach to looking typified

by Bichat and the objective instrumentation of looking that we are describing here.

Photographers took cameras up in hot-air balloons to photograph aerial views that

few had seen before, much as astronauts would later do in their explorations of

space. Scientists attached cameras to microscopes to magnify structures invisible

to the unaided human eye. X rays, introduced to medicine as a diagnostic medium

in the I890s, offered a new vision of the interior of the living human body that

could be reproduced and shared by printing the radiologic image on negative film

or on photographic paper.

The eighteenth-century Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus famously devised

binomial classification, a formal system for classifying each form of animal, plant,

and mineral life known to the sciences of his time according to their genus and

species. Though he regarded humans as uniquely having a soul, Linnaeus placed

humans in the animal kingdom, and, in his tenth edition of his SystemaNaturae,

he introduced a system describing a variety of differences that he identified as

evidence of distinct human types, or races. His species designation Homo sapi-

ens included categories organized more or less on the basis of geographic regions:

"Americanus," "Asiaticus," "Europaeus," and "Afer." He also divided people into

categories that we would now understand to be stigmatized throughout history:

"Monstrosus" included natural anomalies such as conjoined twins, and "Ferus"

included cultural anomalies due to lack of socialization.'?3 Although Linnaeus was

primarily concerned with plants, many of those scientists who took up his work,

including the eighteenth-century Cerman naturalist Johann Blumenbach, switched

from a geographical to a physical appearance basis for their classifications of peo-

ples, organizing the races according to a worldview that linked physical differences

in form and appearance to a hierarchical system purporting to show proof of dif-

ferences in degrees of evolution and development. A taxonomic scheme reflects

an evolutionary history (a phylogeny) from simpler to more complex, "higher"

forms of life. These schemas were used by those engaged in promulgating racial

science during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to support claims about the

inferiority of some races to others. ln addition, they were invoked to advocate for

social policies controlling intermarriage and childbirth with the intent to cultivate

breeding in or breeding out traits and even racial groups themselves. A well-known

example is Nazism's use of racial science to justify their extermination of Jewish

people, whom they saw as an inferior race.

350 | scre r.:rFrc LooKrNc, LooKrNG Ar scrENcE

The taxonomic classification of humans was popular not only in the emer-

gent field of human biology but also in public institutions that provided services

and managed populations. ln the nineteenth century, as Foucault explains, social

institutions-charity homes, hospitals, prisons-documented and classified human

subjects in such categories as the poor, the infirm, the feeble-minded, and criminals

as a means of managing the movements and behavior of large numbers of people.

The desire to keep track of these burgeoning institutionalized populations stemmed

in part from an emerging understanding among institution managers that classifica-

tory systems could be used for social organization and control. These practices are

key features of what Foucault calls biopower, the techniques used in a culture to

subjugate bodies and control populations by targeting the biological features of the

human species.2a Biopower includes managing populations through social hygiene,

public health, education, demography, census-taking, and reproductive regulation.

The camera was used as a tool by social bureaucrats and managers to docu-

ment and classify the many residents of institutions such as jails and schools. ltwas used in ways that foregrounded the biological features of people as signifiers

of behavior; physical features such as ear placement, forehead height, and nose

shape were documented and interpreted in classification systems that made links

between physical appearance and social health or pathology. Practitioners of phre-

nology (the study of the cranium's shape and size), craniology (or craniometry, the

study of the skull's shape an.d size), and physiognomy (the study of facial features

and expression) believed that the physical human body, and most particularly the

cranium and the facial features, could be read for signs of tem- Frc. e.r3

perament, moral capacity, health, and intelligence. Craniology skuls of women criminats, col_

emerged in the nineteenth century as a science of measurement lected by Cesare Lombroso, from

using tactile and visual analysis to establish racial taxonomies his Atlas of the Criminal Man'

for comparing the skulls of different races. Natural scientists 't896-t897

used craniology to make claims about the supposed evolution-

ary superiority of people of European or Anglo descent and to

try to show that people of African or Asian descent have more

recent evolutionary ties to primates.25 The use of these sci-

ences of physical measurement and assessment by touch and

sight was largely motivated by the racist agendas of colonial

powers, which deployed science to justify their subjugation of

nonwhite peoples, defined as incapable of self-determination

because of supposed developmental inferiority. The technique

was also used in criminology. This illustration from the Atlas of

the Criminal Man by the nineteenth-century ltalian positivist

criminologist Cesare Lombroso portrays his collection of skulls

of female criminals, kept for purposes of study with an eye to

the establishment of correlations between particular physical

qualities and criminal tendencies.

$rNa ,F rrBrillfrlN.

SCIENTIFIC LOOKINC, LOOKINC AT SCIENCE l:sr

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Physiognomy-interpreting the outward

appearance and configuration of the body, and

the face in particular-was a popular technique

well before the I800s, as represented in theworkof Barthdlemy Coclds, who, in his Physiognomo-

nia (1533), went so far as to claim that men's

eyelashes may signify inward sentiments such

as pride and audacity. This 1850 engraving of a

chart by the British mapmaker and illustratorJohn

Emslie illustrating the "Principal Varieties of Man-

kind" is typical of the racial thinking of the period

in its placement of the white European male in the

center, with other racial types at the periphery.

Later physiognomists used photography to

refine this sort of physical representation, mea-

surement, and classification. Contemporary readers of Sherlock

Holmes may puzzle over the line uttered by Moriariy, who, on

meeting Sherlock Holmes, observes: "You have less frontal devel-

opment than I should have expected."26 This comment reflects

the sentiment, widely held at the time (the late nineteenth cen-

tury), that facial appearance and skull formation are visible signifiers of "inner" qual-

ities such as intelligence, breeding, and moral standing. ln The Races of Man ( l362),

John Beddoe, who would become a president of the Anthropological Institute, stated

that there is a physical and intellectual difference between those in Britain with pro-

truding jaws and those with less prominent jaws. Whereas the lrish, Welsh, and the

lower classes tend to have protruding or weak jaws, evidence of their lower state

of intelligence, Beddoe argued, English men of genius have prominent jaws. Beddoe

also developed what he called an lndex of Nigressence, a morphological classification

system on the basis of which he proposed that the lrish were closer than the English to

the so-called Cro-Magnon man and thus had links to what he called the "Africinoid"

races, which he regarded as lower on the evolutionary scale. In Beddoe's writing, we

can see how a visual "science" of the body's appearance has been used to support a

deeply racist cultural ideology that relies on a false notion of semiotic fixity.

A modern interpretation of craniology, phrenology, and physiognomy would

tell us that these were pseudosciences, not true sciences, not only because the

links made between appearance and social meaning are false, but because they

rely on the inaccurate idea that appearance and meaning are somehow absolute

and fixed. A postmodern interpretation would take this criticism a step further to

say that all science, including the most advanced contemporary practices, offer

knowledge that is no less informed by culture and ideology. Scientific truth is rel-

ative. Scientific claims are determined by current social thinking, and by national,

political, and economic contexts, as well as by the dynamics of the laboratory and

HG,9,t4

John Emslie, Principal Varieties

of Mankind, r 85o; depiction ofhuman races with Europeans at

the center (color engraved print)

3s2 |SCIENTIFIC LOOKINC, LOOKINC AT SCIENCE

field. This relativist view of science has been the subject

of intense debate and critique since the emergence of sci-

ence studies in the I 970s.27

Craniology, phrenology, and other sciences of catego-

rization are related to the rise of the science of eugenics,

which was devoted to studying and controlling human

reproduction as a means of improving the human race.

Eugenics was founded by Sir Francis Calton, author of the

influential book Hereditary Qenius ( I 869). ln the eugenic

view, not all races were deemed worthy of reproducing;

that is, eugenics was guided by the belief that people

of certain types and races should not breed so that their

traits might be eliminated from humankind. Galton, who

was British, used measurement and the then-new method

of statistics to "read" medical and social pathology off the

surface of the body and to analyze and compare traits.

This illustration from his 1883 lnquiries into Human Faculty

and lts Deuelopment is composed of criminals, prostitutes,

('rruvr/u1.ry.1*//

()murty'hi fit,xt: \r/

FtG, 9. r 5

Francis Calton, from Inquiries

into Human Faculty and ltsDevelopment, 1883

scrENTrFrc LooKrNc, LooKiNc lt t.'r'u.u | 353

II

and people with tuberculosis (consumption) in composite

photographs. Calton was interested in producing a visual

archive of types he regarded .as deviant-types that deviated

from norms of social behavior and mental and physical health.

He believed that by superimposing portraits of different people of

a particular type, he could better capture the general category-a criminal type, for

example, is best captured by a composite of different criminal faces. His physical typol-

ogies were linked to health and social traits in troubling ways, suggesting, for example,

that certain biological types were more or less prone to illnesses and/or social deviance.

Eugenic thinking informed racist eugenic political programs such as German Nazism,

in which scientific discourses including eugenics were used to justify racial genocide.

Paris police officer Alphonse Bertillon built upon the use of photography to iden-

tify criminals by standardizing the mug shot and introducing anthropometry, the

practice of measuring bodily proportions, for identification. Bertillon created a vast

archive of images and data because (unlike Calton, who was interested in general

types) he was interested in identifying individuals, in particular those attempting to

hide their identities (repeat offenders, for instance, who went by different names and

disguises). Bertillon's measurement systems are the origin of the mug shot photo-

graph and fingerprinting, both of which use the distinct aspects of the physical body

to identify an individual.2s Photography theorist Allan Sekula writes that "the projects

of Bertillon and Calton constitute two methodological poles of the positivist attempts

to define and regulate social deviance. . . . Both men were committed to technol-

ogies of demographic regulation."ze Sekula notes that while Galton was interested

in classifying humans into types, Bertillon was motivated by the demands of urban

SPtClmENS 0r GOIIPOSIIE PORIRAIIUIEP€RS()NII,L ANI, FANTILY

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FIG. 9,IT

Clinical photograph by M. Londe

of Blanche Wittman under hyp-

nosis asked to perform astonish-ment for neurologists Jean-MartinCharcot and Paul Richer,

Salp6tridre Hospital, Paris, r883

HG.9.r6Alphonse Bertillon's system foranthropometric measurement;

frontispiece, "Releve du Signale-

ment Anthropometrique" from his

I d e ntif cati o n Anth ro p o m etri qu e:

I nstru cti o ns S i gn a ldti q u es, t893

police work in a burgeoning city to create an information

archive to identify criminals. Photography supplemented

forensic techniques such as fingerprinting, which became

increasingly common by the turn of the century.30 By the

end of the nineteenth century, the visual categorization

of people according to types, and according to specific

identity-linked characteristics, became common practice

in hospitals, schools, prisons, and government agencies,

and many of these institutions continue to employ pho-

tography as a tool for cataloguing subjects, diseases, and

citizens in the twenty-first century.

This kind of image cataloguing was used to track

people caught up in the criminal justice system. It also became common practice

to photograph hospital patients and people with particular medical conditions.

As Foucault notes, the practices of organizing people in social

institutions such as prisons and hospitals tend to be similar.

ln both prisons and hospitals, images were used to establish

visual markers of what was considered normal and abnormal,

and those markers were thus in turn used to identify supposed

criminal or sickly types. Classification was extended to per-

formance in the medical context of this period, evident in the

nineteenth-century photographs and drawings of hysterical

patients produced under the French neurologist Jean-Martin

Charcot. Charcot and his students and colleagues analyzed

hysteria, a diagnostic category no longer in use but popular

among neurologists of that period to describe mysterious

bodily symptoms they observed among their patients. Hyste-

ria was a diagnosis assigned most often to women who were

considered overly emotional, who performed dramatic behav-

iors, and who complained of unusual, sometimes fleeting

physical symptoms (minor pains and pressures, loss of sensa-

tion) that neurologists believed to be psychogenic (to have a

psychological rather than physical cause). At the Salp€tridre,

the mental institution Charcot directed in the late nineteenth

century, neurologists isolated women diagnosed with hysteria

rr:lili:_:ir: t:!,r\,r,,.. .jar.rtir:,

354 | scrrrurrFrc LooKrNc, LooKrNc AT scrENcE

I

i

and visually studied them. These studies included observation of live performances

by women who were provoked to fall into hysterical outbursts on cue before audi-

ences of doctors and trainees, and the photographing of women under hypno-

sis. Charcot and his colleagues believed that empirical observation was the key to

knowledge and used photography as a tool to provide evidence for further obser-

vation. They sometimes hypnotized patients and then photographed the gestures

that they performed under suggestion so that these movements could be analyzed

later. These photographs were thus used to augment empirical looking.

ln all of these instances, the idea that the photograph may capture and reveal

fleeting evidence of abnormalities and disorders is key to its use, whether that

usage is objective or subjective in its orientation. The camera was, in the settings

we have described, a scientific tool for constituting groups of people as Other, dif-

ferent from the socially accepted norm, in the ways described in our earlier discus-

sion about modernity, the human subject, and the era of colonial imperialism. This

use of the camera was prevalent not only in the medical and biological sciences but

also in the social sciences, such as anthropology and sociology.

This photograph, taken in the late nineteenth century, is embedded in the dis-

courses of medicine and race, as well as in colonialism. This image of an Asian man,

posed against a grid while holding his braid, is an example of the use of anthropometry

(the scientific study of the human body's measurements and proportions) to support

claims made on the basis of-appearance about qualitative and

developmental differences (whether social, intellectual, or medi- l'-1;l^11-^." - -+,,)., ^r - ^,Anthropometflc study of a Lhrnesecal). This man's nudity is coded within a scientific discourse that man accordingtoJohn Lamprey's

establishes him as an object for cool and dispassionate study by system ofmeasurement, t868

Western scientists. ln stripping him of his clothing, the anthro- (albumen print)

pologist and photographer stripped him of his dignity. The

photograph does not invite the viewer to regard the man as an

individual but rather to "measure him up," to see the physical

differences that set his physical form apart as an evolutionary

type or specimen of a race.

These scientific systems were discredited as both racist

and unscientific after World War Il. Studying them helps

us to consider how contemporary ideas about "truth" in

scientific practices are often the product of particular visual

discourses and practices. Social and cultural meanings

are assigned to that which is visible and measurable, and

those meanings change over time; we nonetheless rely on

these meanings to make claims about universal facts and

bodily truths. The critique of both the positivist instrumen-

tal augmentation of seeing and empirical observation as a

source of the real has led us to recognize the ideological

limits of claims about seeing and its relationship to facts and

scrrruirrrc LooKtNc. LooKtNc AT sclENcE l:ss

knowledge. ln t950, UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cul-

tural Organization) issued a statement asserting that "race" is not a biological truth

but rather a socially created condition. Their findings were a condemnation of those

"sciences" claiming to provide methods that could be used to "prove" the superior-

ity and inferiority of different "races." Geneticists, anthropologists' psychologists,

and sociologists contributed to the report, which was motivated by the horrified

realization that the racial extermination of Jews carried out in Nazi Germany had

been supported by scientific arguments'

ln contemporary society, the legacy of the nineteenth-century sciences of phys-

ical identification and classification can be seen most vividly in the broad range of

biometric technologies used for identification, security, and criminal investigation.

The scientific identification of DNA in the 1950s, and the subsequent understand-

ings of the individual specificity of DNA profiles, has spurred a whole set of bio-

metric technologies. Digital biometric scanning, from facial recognition and retinal

scanning to DNA "fingerprinting" (in which DNA samples from blood are used

for identification purposes, not related to actual fingerprints), extends the aims of

Galton and Bertillon into scientific realms that use biological and genetic markers,

rather than physiognomy, to identify the individual. These technologies are used for

security at airport checkpoints, national borders, prisons, stores, casinos, and even

schools. Here, we see retinal scans being used to regulate Iraqi citizens during the

Frc. e. re U'S. occuPation of lraq'

A u.S. Marine takes a retinal scan ln the criminal justice system today, DNA fingerprinting is

of a residentof Fallujah,lraq, seen as getting at the "truth" of individual identity and eliminat-Novembelr4, zoo6.ln order to

getaresidentro,thepeoplloi ing the problems of misidentifying or failing to identify repeat"Fallujah

were required to undergo offenders. Biometric technologies, however, can be as unreliable

a biometric exam, including a

retinal scanas nineteenth-century techniques. As the communication scholar

Kelly Cates notes, though DNA is now seen as the "ultimate iden-

tifier," genetic code does not establishI

identification but rather "establishes

only a probability."3r Nevertheless,

there is a strong belief in genetic data-

bases as a contemPorary version of

Bertillon's archive of biometric proof in

appearances.

Facial recognition sYstems,

which are used both in security sys-

tems and in comPuter aPPlications

such as social media Programs that

want to "recognize" PeoPle in Pho-

tographs, are based on the idea that

computers can be "taught" to distin-

guish individual faces. These systems

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use electronic technologies to map the face as a series of inter-

connecting points in algorithmic formulations that are related

to computer animation techniques. As communication schol-

ars Shoshana Magnet and Kelly Gates both point out, contem-

porary biometric technology used for racial profiling supports

assumptions, like those in th'e nineteenth-century sciences,

FlG. 9.20

Video showing targets to be cap-

tured and compared using a facialrecognition system on displayat the Clobal ldentity Summit,Tampa, September, zor5

about the link between racial or ethnic identity and moral tendencies.32 Facial rec-

ognition programs, like Bertillon's archive of photographs and anthropometric data,

are designed not only to recognize faces but also to compare them to a pre-existing

archive of faces. The technology operates across the overlapping worlds of security

and social networks. Thus, the facial recognition algorithms used by Facebook or

Coogle, which are intended to give users the sense that they can easily sort and

classify images of their friends, are ideologically as well as technologically linked

to surveillance systems used by police and investigators. That these systems are

flawed and easily prone to misidentification does not erode their social power or

reputation as systems that make the world more secure and less threatening. This

illusion of security is particularly powerful in today's highly unstable world, in

which classification and seeing are signifiers of order and control.

Bodily Interiors and Biomedical PersonhoodFrom ancient drawings of the body to contemporary digital imaging systems, the

body has been understood in terms that mix the scientific and the magical. At the

time of their introduction in the mid- 1890s, X rays were widely regarded as both a

scientific breakthrough and a wondrous new way of understanding life. Providing

views of the skeletal system, a previously difficult-to-see dimension of the living

SCIENTIFIC LOOKINC, LOOKINC AI SCIENCE | :sz356 | screr.rrrFtc LooKtNc, LooKlNc AT sclENcE

Bcrllyhoo's CondidX"RoyComeromon €'Sm e Al|-f,norr Il!"

tlG.9.2tFantasies of X-ray views in

Ba lly h o o magazine, t 934

body, X rays also suggested new ways of thinking about

the meaning of life and death.33 ln a similarway, the micro-

scope revealed the presence and activity of small units such

as bacteria moving and changing under the lens. As we

have noted, photography launched a new era of scientific

image-making by providing static records of bodily exteri-

ors, interiors, and specimens (microscopic studies of tissue

or blood, for example). The idea of the imaging instrument

as helping us to see better or further than the human eye

is highly relevant to X rays not only because they provide

interior views of living bodies but also because, through

the use of fluoroscopic viewing screens, they allow radiol-

ogists to see some interior processes in living motion.

When X rays were introduced as a diagnostic tool in

the mid-1890s, the public responded with curiosity and

fear to this newway of seeing life. An X-ray image is pro-

duced by exposing the body to ionizing radiation. The waves

that pass through the body are registered on a photographic

plate orscreen. Because the rays do not penetrate bone as read-

ily as soft tissue, the X-ray image provides a relatively clear

depiction of the skeleton and variations in bone density. These images suggested to

early viewers that the technique gave its practitioners superhuman visual powers,

allowing them optically to invade the private space of the body. This fantasy even

took on an erotic cast, as seen in the work of some illustrators who made humor-

ous cartoons, such as this one lrom 1934 which dramatizes the fantasy of a male

cameraman using the rays to peer through women's clothing. At the same time,

X rays were received with awe and fear because of the skeleton's iconographic

association with death. For many, seeing the skeleton system in a living body sug-

gested death in an uncanny, premonitory, or metaphysical way.3a

Although microscopy was introduced in the eighteenth century (by Dutch

fabric merchant Antonie van Leeuwenhoek), it was not until 1930 that the first

virus to be identified was isolated, launching the field of virology. This was the

tobacco mosaic virus (which affected plants), an entity long thought to be a bacte-

rium. Electron microscopy, introduced in the 1930s, offered the potential to see the

structures now called viruses, which scientists had long imagined and experimented

with but could not see. Within a half-decade of the electron microscope's introduc-

tion, the crystallized virus would be made visible and photographed through it. The

crystallographer Rosalind Franklin constructed a model of its structure to display

at the 1938 World's Fair in Brussels. The first X-ray image of a crystal was made

in 1934 by crystallographer Dorothy Hodgkin (the third woman to win a Nobel

Prize), whose images of insulin, vitamin B 12, and penicillin were adapted for wall-

paper, fabric, and household items displayed as part of the Festival Pattern Group,

3s8 |SCIENTIFIC LOOKING, LOOKINC AT SCIENCE

an assemblage of designers and artists

brought together by the British Council

of Industrial Design in 1951.35 Hodgkin

refused to accept a fee or claim copy-

right for her designs, as she insisted

that the crystal patterns on which the

designs were based belonged to nature

and were not her creation. The design

for this silk fabric was based on X-ray

crystallography of hemoglobin.

When in the early I980s the hep-

atitis C virus was first isolated, it was

not through microscopic study of the

actual virus, for it was too small and

changeable to be imaged in that era,

even with the electron microscopes of that time. Rather, it was

imaged and verified in the form of a clone of the viral material, a

copy made from the blood of a primate. Reflecting the concept

of the precession of simulacra described byJean Baudrillard, the

isolation of this virus was an important demonstration of the

idea that the model or copy could serve as proof of the real.

HG,9.22

Sample of woven silk designed by

Bernard Rowland based on X-ray

crystallography of hemoglobin forVanners & Fennell Ltd, Suffolk,

England, and Festival Pattern

Croup, Festival of Britain, r 95r

scrENTrFrc LooKtNc, LooKlNc ot tt't*t' | 359

Ultrasound images provide another example of a category of medical images that

has been invested with public meaning and cultural desires. Sonography, the pro-

cess of imaging the internal structures of an object by measuring and recording the

reflection of high-frequency sound waves that are passed through it, was introduced

to medicine experimentally in the early 1960s, after its use in submarine warfare. It

became a cornerstone of diagnostic medical imaging by the 1980s. Whereas X rays

create images of dense structures (such as bones) and involve the use of potentially

harmful ionizing radiation, ultrasound allows discernment of softer structures and

(debatably) does not damage tissue. Ultrasound provides an instructive example of

how visual knowledge is highly dependent on factors other than sight. We tend to

think of the ultrasound image as a kind of window into the body through which we

see soft-tissue structures. But in fact ultrasound involves the visual only in the last

instance, almost as an afterthought to a process that is markedly lacking in visual-

ity. Ultrasound had its foundation in military sonar devices designed to penetrate

the ocean with sound waves and measure the waves reflected back as indicators of

distance and location of objects. In this technique, sound is utilized as an abstract

means of deriving measurements. The data generated by measuring sound waves

acquired through sonar are computed to assemble a record of object location and

density in space. But this record need not be visual. It can take the form of a chart,

graph, picture, or numerical sequence. Data derived from sonography is analyzed

with computers and then translated into data fields, taking the form of graphic images

Medical images such as ultrasounds and MRIs have also been integrated into

nonmedical advertisements to signify special care of the body or to evoke the

authority of scientific knowledge. The role of the fetal sonogram as an icon of one's

imagined future family is evident in this classic I990 advertisement selling Volvo's

reputation as the safe family car. This advertisement features a fetal sonogram with

the message "something inside you is telling you to buy a Volvo."36 lt appeals

to an imagined maternal desire to protect the fetus while also playing on cultural

anxieties about women's bodies not being safe enough spaces for fetuses without

the help of a technological safeguard (the Volvo, a brand widely known during that

time for its safety-forward design). lt is the image of the nascent "child" as an icon

of family that tells the viewer she must conform to cultural messages about the

woman's obligation to minimize fetal risks. ln this ad, the fetus is positioned as if

it is in the driver's seat, suggesting that the human subject in control, the one who

drives the logic of the ad, is not the mother but the child-to-be.

The idea that women visually bond with their future children through sono-

gram images, a message that has circulated in obstetrical discourse since the early

1980s, has prompted the widely researched question of whether ultrasound viewing

is tied to women's decisions about abortion.sT ls the lure of the ultrasound image

of the fetus more powerful than its textual or graphic representation? These queries

have sparked a debate among cultural analysts and medical practitioners, and it

remains a vexing issue, in part because the boundaries between the medical and the

ethical and personal issues are bluned, making it clear that it would be impossible to

confine this image to the category of medical diagnostic evidence alone.38

This view of the sonogram as a social document awards to the fetus the status

of personhood (and a place in family and community) more typically attributed

to the infant after birth. The characterization of the fetus as a

person has been a central factor in legal cases in which the fetus :1"-::-^, --^- ^r.^+^^.- , .

has been represented in legal terms by adults who feel they may t:il::ilt; ""n' pnotosrapn or a

speak on its behalf and who pit it against the wishes or

rights of pregnant women who may, for example, seek

abortion, or who may require medical treatment that may

place the fetus at risk.3e The fetal image thus acquires

meanings beyond its medical meanings in obstetrical

screening and diagnosis, extending to law, religion, and

everyday ethics in a range of national settings.

This complex set of factors has fueled political

debates about fetal images since 1965, when Life maga'

zine published on its cover a photograph widely mistaken

to be a depiction of a living fetus. The photograph was

one of a series by Swedish science photographer Lennart

Nilsson, whose popular book .4 Child Is Born depicted

fetuses at various stages of gestational development

until birth.a0 Nilsson's earliest fetal photographs were

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that in some cases look a bit like black-and-white photographs. These images may be

moving or still frames. Paradoxically, sonography is a "sound"-based system, though

it involves neither hearing nor the production of noise. lt is only because there exists

a cultural preference for the visual that ultrasound's display capabilities have been

adapted to conform to photographic and video image conventions and not to the

standards of, say, the linear graph or the numerical record.

Ultrasound has been used widely in obstetrics, a field in which practitioners had

long sought means to image the fetal body and to track its development and identify

normal and abnormal structures without placing the fetus or the pregnant woman at

risk of radiation. However, less than a decade into the sonogram's use in obstetrics,

studies began to show that pregnancy outcomes were only minimally improved by its

use in routine prenatal care; that is, there was little evidence that the technique offered

clear benefits. Rates for prenatal ultrasound use doubled in Britain in the 1980s, how-

ever, despite this lack of evidence. Why did this imaging technique become so pop-

ular among obstetricians and their patients, and why does its use continue in the

routine monitoring of normal pregnancies? What are its implications with respect to

decision-making concerning fetal anomalies and pregnancy termination choice?

These questions in themselves suggest that the fetal sonogram seryes a purpose

beyond medicine; in other words, the fetal sonogram is not simply a scientific or

medical image or diagnostic tool. It is also an image with deep cultural, emotional,

ethical, and even, for some, religious meanings. It is worth noting that there is a

Iong history of imagining the fetus or embryo to be a nascent person in the womb,

and as such its image generates wonder, holds tremendous cultural importance, and

is rife with iconic status. lndeed, as we noted earlier in this chapter, even Leonardo

,c. s.23 da Vinci was interested in studying the fetus by creating images

of it. The sonogram of the fetus is now a cultural rite of pas-volvo pnnt ad leatunng a tetus,

r99o sage in which women and their families get their first "portrait"

of the child-to-be. Some expecting parents relate to the

sonogram quite personally, pinning it up on the refriger-

ator and proudly showing it off to family members and

coworkers just as one might display a first baby picture.

Sonograms routinely turn up on Facebook to announce

the expected child.

Similarly, other kinds of clinical medical images are

increasingly viewed by patients in the course of treatment.

Since the 1990s, patients undergoing ultrasound and endo-

scopic procedures (in which a tiny fiber-optic camera is

passed through narrow orifices to record a moving image

of the bodily interior) have been able to view their proce-

dures in real time, and sometimes patients are given prints

or image files from their procedures in order to better under-

stand their condition and treatment or to keep on file in a

personal archive of medical records.

360 | screr'rrlFrc LooKrNc, LooKrNc AT scrENcE

enhanced and modified shots of specimens, yet they were often mistaken for pho-

tographs of living fetuses taken in utero. This image is presented in ways that sug-

gest it depicts the miracle of life. Yet book and magazine readers are not informed

that the embryos shown have been surgically removed and are not alive. Like the

Renaissance artists who drew from cadavers to better understand life, Nilsson pho-

tographed fetal cadavers to make enhanced illustrations of fetal life before birth.

Nilsson's technical strategies included rendering the color photographs in golden

and orange tones (not unlike the colorization of the designer T cells discussed ear-

lier), suggesting warm flesh and flowing blood. In this image we can see how the

fetus is depicted as if floating in space, surrounded by lights that look like stars and

providing a feeling of the cosmos.

These images, along with Nilsson's book, present scientific imaging of the

body's interior as a source of evidence of life. The central narrative of these

images is that medical photography and other forms of interior biomedical imag-

ing are evidence of nothing short of a miracle in modern culture. The "miracle"

refers both to control over human reproduction and development and, by impli-

cation, scientific imaging. Nilsson continued to develop his techniques and by

the 1990s was using endoscopic technologies to create images of fetuses that

were actually living in the womb, producing images of live fetuses at seven weeks

of development. But the tendency to represent the fetus in realist conventions

has persisted, with 3D and 4D imaging among the options available. The "What

to Expect" website illustrates the interpellation of the expectant parent into an

engagement with the technology as a form of family portraiture: with 3D ultra-

sound, "instead of just seeing a profile of your cutie's face, you can see the whole

surface (it looks more like a regular photo)." 4D imaging shows movement, so

you can "see your baby doing things in real time (like opening and closing his

eyes and sucking his thumbl."rt

Some feminist critics of science have noted that Nilsson's images do more

than provide compelling fetal images. Like the Volvo ad, they virtually erase the

mother and, in their staging and composition, convey the sense that the fetus has

the feelings, actions, and status of an infant. Taken of nonliving specimens outside

the womb, these images depict fetuses as if they are living people floating in space,

and not actually nascent forms dependent upon the body of a woman for survival.a2

Just a few years after the Life cover fetus image was published, filmmaker Stanley

Kubrick evoked it in his 1968 film 2001: A Spaee Odyssey, in a scene in which the

main character becomes an old man and then finally a fetus floating in space, a

metaphor for rebirth and the cyclical nature of human existence. But in Nilsson's

work, the fetus is awarded personhood through the imaging process itself.

Concepts of biomedical personhood are derived not only from ultrasound and

fetal imaging, but also from the vast array of new kinds of technical images that

have proliferated in the last few decades. While PET and MRI have been used to

scan the body in whole and in part, brain images have produced strong cultural

352 |SCIENTIFIC LOOKINC, LOOKINC AT SCIENCE

associations with personhood and have thus circulated through various social con-

texts such as advertisements and public service ads. Brain scans hold great cultural

power, given that the brain is associated with thought, individual feelings, and free

will. While brain scans are culturally and socially understood as images, they are

derived in fact from different kinds of data systems that are only later realized as

images. An MRI (magnetic resonance image), for example, is derived from magnetic

field and radio wave measurements. A PET (positron emission tomography) scan is

made by injecting and tracing the path of radiation through the body. ln his book

Pieturing Personhood, science studies scholar Joseph Dumit notes that PET scans

of the brain have quite regularly circulated in popular media as visual evidence ofparticular kinds of mental states and disorders. Dumit is careful to note that what

such images mean to experts is quite complex, but in colorized renditions of brain

activity they appear to tell the public something visually about the self and the

mind. As early as 1983, Vogue magazine ran an image of three PET scans of brains

that were Iabeled Normal, Schizo, and Depressed, thus demonstrating the ease

with which such images are used not just to designate the "type" of brain one

has but also, by extension, the "brain-type" of person one is.ar As Dumit explains,

such images are much more effective in demonstrating abnormalities than they are

in establishing norms, and in the case of mental illnesses it is

much easier to diagnose patients using traditional psychiatric Ftc. e.25

evaluative techniques than.to read an image of the brain. Colorized PET scans, external

However, perhaps because of the positivist legacy of views of left side of brain' Yellow-

machine imaging, brain scans carry enormous power to sug- ;1i,;:?1Jil":iiEJ"",:: l]"t'gest the "facts" of brain states and mental disorders. Scans "depressed." (Bottom) "Healthy"

have thus been introduced in legal contexts to affirm, for brain activity in a patient after

instance, the mental state of a defendant. These images are treatmentfordepression'

often colorized (both as part of the imaging process and

to enhance the view of the brain) in ways that appear

to render the brain image legible. But colorization also

enhances the image as an aesthetic and cultural arti-

fact. These images are a contemporary outgrowth of

the nineteenth-century use of the camera as an imag-

ing technology of measurement, deployed specifically

to visually demarcate location and physical evidence of

abnormalities that would otherwise be elusive to sight,

Iinking physical evidence to feelings, thoughts, and dis-

positions. For example, in this image, PET scans are used

to visually demonstrate the difference in activity in the

brains of a person who is "depressed" and a person who

is "not depressed." There is persuasive power in the use

of color to code depression. Moreover, the image implic-

itly affirms research that links depression to particular

sctiNrtrtc LooKrNc, LooKlNc nt t.,t*t' | 353

The appeal of the genetic model of the body rests in its rendering of the body as

a kind of accessible digital map, something easily decipherable, understandable, and

containable in the form of code. The HGP was presented, in the I 990s, as a means

through which the body's potential resistance to disease could be restructured. The

genomic map, which was fully sketched out in an initial stage by 2003, resulted in

the identification of I ,800 disease genes and provided the basis for more than I ,000

genetic tests for human conditions. The HapMap project was begun in 2005 to map

the full spectrum of genetic diseases. (ln a procedure that is typical of medical pro-

tocols, the volunteers whose DNA was used for the project are anonymous in ways

that recall the anonymity assigned to dissected bodies.)

Scientists and journalists describe the HCP metaphorically as the culmination

of modern science in its potential for control over the human body. The gene is

thus constructed as the magical code to explain life. Scientific metaphors are not

simply ways of talking; they are constitutive of what science sees, and they affect

how scientific practices are conducted and understood inside and outside the lab.

These metaphors are the chosen metaphors of geneticists themselves, who adopt

these models to describe their own work.

References to the Renaissance abound in science in ways that reveal underly-

ing narratives about reproduction, replication, and the alliance of art and science.

ln these analogies, the Renaissance is perceived to be an era of immense progress

in human creativity and fine art, and the current biotech era is seen, by analogy,

to be equally historically important. These connections are encapsulated in this

1995 ad for a DuPont DNA labeling kit called Renaissance. The ad appropriates

Andy Warhol's work, Thirty Are Better Than One (1963), which

is composed of numerous copies of the Mona lisa, to refer to

the product's replication qualities. The image is effective, yetFlG.9.26

DuPont Renaissance'" ad, t995

it carries many unintended ironies. Haraway has writ-

ten of this ad, "without attribution, Du Pont replicates

Warhol replicates da Vinci replicates the lady herself. And

RenaissancerM gets top billing as the real artist because it

facilitates replicability."45 lt is a further irony that Du Pont

then trademarked the Renaissance product name, claim-

ing intellectual property rights to the name of an historical

epoch in order to sell the idea of reproduction.

ln earlier scientific epochs, we have shown, practices

of looking were central to discriminatory systems claim-

ing to be objective knowledge systems. The identification

of visible and measurable differences in skin tone and

color and body shape and size has been used to justify

stereotypes and discriminatory practices. Today, these

appearance-related markers of natural difference are sup-

plemented or replaced by the supposedly more accurate

Smilel Renaissance non-rad DNA labeljng kis,give you reproducible resulLs, not high backgrounos's.&'*+iry .--.:._

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brain areas as something more meaningful than clinical diagnosis. How is thisbrain image anything like the truth of depression? What does it tell us that wouldmatter in better understanding and treating depression?

The Cenetic and Digital BodyThroughout the history of science and medicine, the body has been defined withinmany different paradigms. Ancient concepts of the body presented it as a mallea-

ble, magical figure, like clay. In the early stages of modernity, in the seventeenth

and eighteenth centuries, the body was often characterized as a clockwork mech-

anism, within the machinic worldview of that era.aa As the Industrial Revolution

ushered in the era of steam, the body was imagined as being like an engineered

machine, exuding heat and energy. The body of the early twentieth century, in

which antibiotics were developed, was understood to be knowable at the scale ofthe molecular and represented in narratives invoking battles and warfare as the site

of invasion by bacteria and viruses. The mid-twentieth-century body (the Cold Warbody) was described as a communication system within the emerging paradigm ofcybernetics, as signals sent and received according to a self-regulating system. The

computing model still pertains as we increasingly interpret our bodies though ever-

more-refined systems of measurement and quantification.

In the 1980s and I990s, the genetic paradigm of life took a new form, whichin many ways intersected with digital and postmodern paradigms. The body was

understood as flexible and changeable, in the same way that digital technologyinvolved networking, coding, and remixing. The genetic body of the late twentieth

century was characterized in terms of code, understood through the frameworks ofmathematics and computer systems as a body that not only operated according togenetic code but could also be recoded, genetically altered, and cured.

The Human Genome Project (HCP), a global scientific endeavor to create a

complete genetic "map" of the human genome, was begun in the late I980s, at

a moment when genetics captured the scientific and popular imagination. By the

1990s, genetics became the field that scientists and the public turned to for clues

about the origins of everything from smoking to schizophrenia, from cancer tocriminal behavior, prompting the rise of gene therapy, genetic counseling, and

genetic testing. Genetic science is not simply about identifying the genes that con-

stitute the human chromosome; it is also about identifying genes linked to disease,

behavior, and physical appearance. Genetic therapy thus understands genes as theyrelate to medical aberrations and pathologies. Just as nineteenth-century scientificmeasurement practices were used to shore up ideologies of racial difference, so

gene identification and therapy is used to map and alter differences among human

subjects..These techniques also have the potential to be used in troublingways.Genetics has emerged as a potentially problematic signifying system in discourses

of biological and cultural difference.

354 |SCIENTIFIC LOOKINC. LOOKINC AT SCIENCE

visual technique of morphing, for instance, makes it difficult FtG'e'27a'e'27b

to distinguish between one person and another, thus collaps- ;"J?"1LtJ#n:iffHlf;*'ing the boundaries between bodies that were once considered Faces," National ceographic,

inviolable. Digital morphing techniques were introduced in NovembertS'zor3

the 1990s and are sometimes used to make statements about

universal humanity and the blending together of races, such as the legendary

Michael Jackson video, Black or white ( l99l), in which people of different eth-

nicities are morphed from. one into another. Jackson used this new visual tech-

nology to make a statement about racial harmony. ln 1993, Time magazine ran a

much-discussed cover, "The New Face of America," with a computer-simulated

image of a woman composited from the U.S. population's various racial identi-

ties. These morphed images recall the nineteenth-century composite photographs

of Sir Francis Calton, although their intent was not to identify abnormal types but

to see all humans as connected.

As concepts of racial identity continue to change, depictions of actual multi-

racial identity have built upon these previous virtual imaginings. In 2013, National

Qeographic's l25th anniversary issue included an article on the "changing face of

America," including a series of portraits of multi-racial families by the New York-

based Cerman photographer Martin Schoeller, who explained: "l like building cata-

logs of faces. I want to challenge the way we use appearance to shape identity."+s

An interactive gallery allows readers of the online version to scroll through a com-

pendium of different faces of people identifying as mixed, published with the U.S.

Census data provided in 2000, the first year that respondents were given the option

to check more than one identity box. As the journalist Michelle Norris points out,

the codification of difference via appearance is complex and can be contradictory

and even painful. Norris quotes from responses she has collected through her own

"Race Card Project." one respondent quips, "l am only Asian when it is conve-

nient." Anotherwrites, "lonely lifewhen blacklookswhite."4eAs Norris notes, sta-

tistics and appearances tell only a part of the story. As the science studies scholars

scrENTlFlc LooKlNC, LOOKINC o"t',,tt | 367

sign of the invisible gene. We now understand ourselves to exist at the molecular

level. As an invisible marker, genetic code seems more fixed and more factual,

far from the field of discourse, outside of historical context and the social field

of power and knowledge. lf differences are genetically determined and therefore

immutable (except perhaps through gene therapies or drug treatments), it becomes

easy to imagine that social forces may not be responsible for or effective in chang-

ing differences of mental capacity, physical skill, and other human attributes. For

instance, a genetic argument could be used to claim that criminals are genetically

predisposed to commit crimes; hence, we need not waste money on programs toimprove their social environments. Cenetic mapping has raised the specter of a

world in which people could be discriminated against by insurance companies and

other institutions because of their genetic makeup, and laws are now being enacted

to protect against this eventuality.

A genome is a map of an organism's DNA, and we have so far in this chapter

discussed how DNA has been used for security and surveillance and how mapping

the genome is potentially a tool for discrimination. But there are many contempo-

rary instances in which DNA testing and genomic mapping have empowered ordi-

nary citizens. For instance, through the lnnocence Project, some people who have

been wrongly convicted of crimes have been exonerated by the retesting of DNAevidence. ln Argentina, where the Madres delaPlaza de Mayo have demanded forover thirty years evidence about their children who were disappeared by the militaryjunta that ruled from l976lo 1985, many of the grandmothers have been reunited

with their grandchildren who were secretly adopted into military families at birth(after their mothers were killed). lt is through DNA testing that these family con-

nections have been identified, confirmed, and reinstated. As Alondra Nelson writesinThe Social Life of DNA, the use of genetic information has been a crucial aspect

of African Americans charting their personal histories of slavery and mixed-race

heritages. Nelson charts the "DNA diasporas" that link the exploration of roots toracial justice. The shift from a view of genetic science as a highly suspicious enter-prise to a tool that can be marshaled for reparation has implemented paradigm shiftsin certain communities, particularly the African American community that has been

subject to centuries of racist and discriminatory scientific practices.a6 These efforts

to use DNA evidence to build community, many of which take place through low-cost, direct-to-consumer DNA testing, can provide family narratives that make

sense of complex racial inheritances, including enslaved ancestors. These practices

are not without problems or unintended consequences, yet the belief in scientificevidence weighs heavily. As Nelson notes, we ask DNA "to embody some of ourloftiest goals for social betterment," though clearly "we cannot rely on science topropel social change."+t DNA testing and genome mapping are both ways throughwhich the body and its meanings are reimagined, for better and for worse.

The image of the genetic body is also an image of the digital body, a data

body that can be easily combined and reassembled in postmodern fashion. The

365 |SCIENIIFIC LOOKINC, LOOKINC AT SCIENCE

l

oNAid"*'1..[;;l*t:

l,lI

Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star write, to classify is

human. But as they show in the case of the South Afri-

can apartheid system, to classify has consequences and

may be rife with political implications and risk as well as

fraught with instability and contradiction. Classification

does not just reflect differences; it also produces them,

engendering social consequences.s0

Artist Nancy Burson has been a major force in the

development of visual morphing of bodily appearances

not only in the art world but also in the crossover area

between art, science, and police forensics. ln the late

1980s, Burson was instrumental in developing computer

software that "aged" portraits-that is, she worked on the

soffware to create a virtual rendering of a person as he or

she could be predicted to look many years after the pho-

tograph was taken, based on composites of photographs

of their relatives along with genetic science research onFIG. 9.28

Nancy Burson, billboard for theHuman Race Machine, New York

City, zooo, sponsored by Creative

Tim

358 | sclerrrrrFrc LooKrNc, LooKrNc Ar scrENcE

heritability of features. This technique was an important break-

through in creating images through which to continue searching

for missing persons, and in particular children, years after their

disappearance. The technique she helped to devise continues to

be used to speculatively "age-progress" missing persons.

Burson's Human Race Machine (2000) allows participants to visualize them-

selves as different races. She writes, "the concept of race is not genetic, but social.

The HumanRace Machine allows us to move beyond difference and arrive at same-

ness."5l lf we compare Burson's HumanRace Machine to Bertillon's and Calton's

charts, we can see how concepts of difference and sameness have guided not only

the scientific technique of human classification but also the humanitarian concept

of human connection. This concept may be as troubling, in its dream of homoge-

neity and the supposed ease of imagining oneself into a different identity, as the

difference that racial science sought to uphold.

Contemporary imaging techniques such as morphing indicate not only changing

concepts of the postmodern digital body but also the changing relationship between

the body and technology. One of the primary concepts for thinking about the rela-

tionship between the body and technology is the cyborg, a figure touched upon in

earlier chapters. A cyborg, or cybernetic organism, is part technology and part organ-

ism. The cyborg has its roots in early computer science and the science of cybernet-

ics, which Norbert Wiener founded in the poslwar period as a science that integrated

communication theory and control theory.s2 Early computer scientists worked withthe idea that man-made devices could be incorporated into the human body's reg-

ulatory feedback chains to fulfill the desire for a "new and better being." Since the

1980s, the cyborg has been theorized, most famously by the feminist science studies

scholar Donna J. Haraway, as an identity that has emerged in the context of postwar

technoculture. lt is a posthuman identity that represents the breaking down of tra-

ditional boundaries between body and technology. ln her famous 1985 essay "The

Cyborg Manifesto," Haraway theorized the cyborg as a means to think about the

transformation of subjectivity in a late capitalist world of science, technology, and

biomedicine.s3 Rather than suggesting that subjects experience technology solely

as an external and oppressive force, Haraway writes of the body-technology rela-

tionship as one also filled with potential for imagining and building new worlds and

new ways of living. There are, of course, people whom we might think of as literal

cyborgs, people who have prosthetics and electronic devices embedded within their

bodies. Much contemporary work in cyborg theory postulates that we are all cyborgs

to a certain extent, given our complex bodily relationships with technology; for

example, our interaction with our computers and mobile phones means that we can

experience technologies as inseparable from our bodies. More recent work on the

body-machine relationship develops Haraway's point that we both fear and revere

science and technology, enjoying their benefits while remaining cautious about their

economic, political, environmental, social, physical, and emotional impacts.

From the cyborg body to the genetic body to the digital body, concepts of the

body continue to shift as new epistemes emerge, existing in both contradiction and

conformity with old ones. For instance, contemporary understandings of how we

coexist with the vast number of microbes in our bodies as a kind of ecosystem and

of the role of viruses in activating the body's immune system

have begun .to replace the idea of the body as an entity at war rtG' e'2e

with bacteria and viruses. we arso rive in a time when rhe struc- illl iilll:,li'.,!!"!'!;^*^rtures of behavior, attention, and choice are increasingly guided created byalgorithm, dimensions

bymathematicalcomputeralgorithms.Algorithms,computer variable)

sctiurtrtc LooKtNc, LooKlNc nr screr'rce I 359

codes that create the structure of programs, shape much of our online interactions

and participation. They determine how Coogle curates images for us, how Amazon

recommends books and products to us, and how Facebook presents ads, news, and

friends to us. Algorithms, which are of course programmed by humans, increasingly

shape financial markets and, by extension, human taste and behaviors. ln design,

we see one example of this new paradigm in generative design, in which algorithms

are used to create design patterns as if on their own. To create this work, the artist

Enzo Henze instructed the computer to draw like a human-the strands look like

threads, which are then printed on paper.sa The algorithm is emerging as a key force

in shaping culture, yetwe rarely see its form visualized, as it is in Figure 9.29.

Visu alizing Pharmaceuticalsand Science ActivismThe contemporary body is not only defined by genetics and digital code; it is also

imagined as a body that can be transformed, even down to the core of identity,through pharmaceuticals. This is a terrain in which the vast and powerful drug

industry has played a powerful role, partially mediated by government regulation, in

creating ideas about how personalities and personal outlooks on the world and daily

life can be transformed and improved. While there is little doubt that mental illness,

trauma, and clinical depression are significant problems in the world, the discourse

of pharmacology is aimed more broadly at the general population, constructingeveryone as a potential patient and consumer of mood- and personality-altering

drugs. The goal of many of these companies is to create populations of patients

who don't simply take drugs once in a while to stay healthy, but who, as Joe Dumitputs it, take drugs "for life," with the double meaning of taking them to stay alive,

and taking them every day throughout one's life.ss

The United States and New Zealand are the only countries that allow direct-to-

consumer (DTC) advertising for prescription drugs. Advertising has thus become

one of the ways in which consumer-patients receive information about medication

choices in these national contexts. DTC advertising speaks directly to consumers,

even though they can only purchase these drugs with a doctor's prescription. This

kind of marketing has generated debates about advertising ethics and the logic ofpromoting drugs outside a medical context. Proponents point to surveys showingthat most medical professionals feel that these ads have a positive effect in moti-vating patients to be active in their health care decisions. A similar argument can

be made about the vast amount of medical information now available to people

online. Yet there is also significant evidence and concern that DTC ads make drugs

seem better than they actually are.

DTC ads construct particular kinds of subjects. Their aim is, quite simply, tosell drugs and promote their continued use, and they do so by speaking to con-

sumers as potentially abnormal and diseased subjects. Thus, these ads interpellate

370 |SCIENTIFIC LOOKINC, LOOKINC AT SCIENCE

consumers as subjects in need of chemical modification that will make them hap-

pier, more normal, and more fulfilied. Many of these ads have checklists that con-

sumers might easily feel interpellated by. Dumit notes that like these ads, checklist

exercises on websites, where potential patients answer questions to receive a score

that indicates if they might need such a drug, function as a kind of self-help mecha-

nism to create empowered self-identified patients. Yet they are also disempowering.

He notes: "Even if feeling and experience are used to filloutthe checklist, the algo-

rithm then decides whether or not these count as objective symptoms. The score

one receives thus takes the place of a lived experience of illness; the score can even

become its own experience."s6

It is a convention of DTC ads that they offer abstract promises through

depicting people in post-treatment states of being. By law, ads that are indicated

(meaning that they discuss the conditions that the drug is designated to treat)

are required to provide information about the potential negative side effects.

This often results in advertising texts that are comically at cross-purposes, with

soft-focus images of smiling people accompanied by lists of horrifying potential

side effects. Nonindicated ads are not required to do this, but they are also not

allowed to mention the conditions they are indicated for, resulting in ads that

are abstract and mysterious, featuring feel-good situations with little concrete

information.

In general, DTC ads do.not feature images of people taking drugs or receiving

medical treatments, instead displaying happy and content people in casual, leisure

situations or offering short, vague testimonials about how good they feel. Many

use cartoon graphics to depict how molecules and bodies interact. In this campaign

for Zoloft, a popular antidepressant, pill-like cartoon figures stand in for humans

whose mood and outlook have been improved by the drug.

This campaign borrows from early twentieth-century ads that used a comic

book narrative format to tell a story of a fictional consumer (this is "Kathy's story").

Dumit notes that these stories produce a kind of "pharmaceu-

tical witnessing" in which the telling of the story constructs Flc. e.3o

the viewer in a position "of having to make sense of the story Screen shots fromzoloft

or ignore the risk it portrays altogether."sT That there are risks fi:H;U?,i?;ffii::l

? Chernieal lmbalance

Diamaiizalion

j

o

Symplons persist svery day {0r al i€agt t$0 weeks.

sclENTlFlc LooKlNC, LOOKINC nr scrrrucr I

371

oN€RV€

ATI€RY€

I

in selling drugs this way is a key point in criticisms of DTC ads. For instance, the

popular drug Vioxx, which was used to treat arthritis and other muscular pain, had

a very successful DTC campaign using former skating champion Dorothy Hamill to

extol its transformative potential. When the Food and Drug Administration reported

in 2oO4that Vioxx may have contributed to the deaths of almost 28,000 users (out

of 25 million), it was rapidly withdrawn from the market by its manufacturer Merck.

creating consumers for pharmaceuticals, which is what DTC ads do, thus involves

a level of risk beyond that of most advertising'

Ads sell more than a brand; they sell something larger-a lifesiyle, a national ide-

ology, capitalism, an identifi, or consumerism itself. Like other types of ads, DTC ads

are not just about selling drugs as a normal, everyday part of our lives' They are also

about selling science, medicine, and their institutions as essential aspects of our every-

day existence and not just as places we might turn to during periods of illness' As

Dumit puts it, the pill-taking citizen believed to have multiple health risks has become

the norm.58 DTC ads encourage consumers to keep using certain medications. The

benefit to pharmaceutical companies of keeping consumers on drugs for extended

periods of time is clear. Going on a drug for life, rather than for the relatively brief

period from illness to recovery, means lifetime participation in a consumer market'

pharmaceutical and medical visual culture extends beyond the advertising of

products to consumers. Public debate over the role of pharmaceutical companies

in the business of health has produced competing kinds of images. Since the AIDS

crisis of the 1980s, artists have produced images and media texts questioningthe

ties between private corporate interests and national health care. Artist-activists

have questioned the role of corporate science in health care and the role of the

media in reporting on scientific advances in health care since the 1980s.

ln the t980s and t990s, ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) intro-

duced a new era of political visual culture about scientific

flG. 9.31

ACr up Newyork outreach practice. Acr uP explicitly challenged both cultural percep-

Committee, tt,sBigBusiness!,1989 tions about AIDS and policies concerning science and medi-

(offset lithograph poster) cal funding and research. ACT UP's visual campaigns, which

l

I

IT'5 BIG BUSINESS!(BUT WHO'S MAKINGA KlttlNco

included performances, sit-ins,

videos, and posters, were an imPort-

ant venue for the distribution of accu-

rate health and scientific information

about AIDS transmission at a time

in history when science and medi-

cine were ignoring the crisis. ACT

UP used images as an integral aspect

of their provocative public interven-

tions to get mainstream media to pay

attention to the AIDS crisis. ACT UP

distributed its messages as posters'

372 | scrrr.rrlFlc LooKlNc LOOKINC AI SCIENCE

stickers, and stencils on the sidewalk to

shock the public into thinking about the

presence of people with AIDS, the gov-

ernment's refusal to address the growing

health crisis, and the role of pharmaceuti-

cal companies in the epidemic' The visual

culture of AIDS activism was one of the

most transformative and effective interven-

tions of visual activism by nonscientists in

the twentieth-century culture of science'

The contemPorary health landscaPe

thus includes a broad range of activities from

the big business of pharmaceutical compa-

nies to activism to an increased amount of

self-help information that questions science'

Breast cancer awareness campaigns, built

on the example of early AIDS activism, pro-

duced a broad array of consumer products 'uc.s.3z

and have built corporate alliances' as seen in this Estee Lauder Estee Lauder breast cancer

campaign, which is shot like a fashion ad' awareness ad'zot4

The "pinkwashing" of bieast cancer has been criticized

as a kitsch and narrowly gendered response to disease demanding of breast

cancer patients that they be upbeat and cheery' feminine subjects festooned

in an ideology of P ink ribbons and merchandise.5e Though the campaigns have

been highly succes sful in raising awareness and funds for research' the narrow

scope of their aPPea I marginalizes women and men who do not identify with

the narrowly defined types of breast cancer victim and survivor' As science

studies scholar S' Loc hlann Jain asks in her essay "Cancer Butch"' and in her

2013 book Malignant, in the pink-washed culture of breast cancer, "how can [a

butch] maintain her investment in performing toughness, let alone recuperate

butchness, in the sea of pink designed to'heal'by restoring and recuperating a

presumed'lost' femininitY?" oo

As the images discussed in this chapter demonstrate, science and its objects'

such as the pursuit of the cause of and cure for cancer, are not created in a vacuum

or in a world separate from social and cultural meaning. Representations of sci-

ence in popular media have a reciprocal influence on how scientists do science

and how people live in and with a world laced with the affects and technologies

of science. scientific images, models, and simulations have cultural meanings that

govern not only how they are produced and what purpose they serve but also what

form life will take in our future. Patients can watch their medical procedures as

they take place and ..redesign,, their bodies with drugs, genes, and surgeries. our

domestic realms and workplaces are permeated with sophisticated technologies

scrENTrFrc LooKlNc, LooKlNc ot sc'ttc' | 373

r4. Mark B. Sandberg, Li.ving Pictures, Missing Persons: Mannequins, Museums, and Modernity (Prince-

ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, zooz).

r5. SeeAnneCa6lleSaliot,TheDrownedMuse:CastingthelJnknownWomanAcrosstheTidesofModer-rilty (New York: Oxford University Press, zot5), z-3.

r 6. Michael Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago: Uni-versity of Chicago Press, 't987); and Jennifer Doyle, "Sex, Scandal, and Thomas Eakins's The Cross

Clinic," Rep resentati o ns 68 (Fa | | t 99 9) : t -33.

r 7. Fried, Reali sm, \V riti n g, D isf gu rati o n, 62.

r8. As was the case for the Cross Clinic work, the Agnew Clinic painting was rejected for prestigiousexhibitions, and it was criticized when it was put on display in the Chicago World Exposition ofr 893.

r9. Van Dijck, TheTransparent Body,59.

zo. The New York State Attorney Ceneral's Office demanded in zoo8 that the exhibition signage state

that it could not be verified whether or not some specimens were from victims who were torturedor executed in Chinese prisons.

zr. See Jos6 van Dijck, "Bodyworlds: The Art of Plastinated Cadavers," Confgurations 9, no. r (zoor):

99-tz6; and Jos6 van Dijck, The Transparent Body: A Cultural Analysis of Medical Imaging (Seattle:

University of Washington Press, zot5).

zz. Cathy Hannabach, "Bodies on Display: Queer Biopolitics in Popular CulLure," Journal of Homosex-

uality 63, no. 3 (zor 6): 349-68.

23. On Linnaeus's inclusion of these categories in the roth edition of Systema Naturae (Linnaeus,

r758), see David Notton and Chris Stringer, "Who ls the Type of Homo Sapiensl," International

Commission on Zoological Nomenclature FAQ, http://iczn.org/content/who-type-homo-sapiens.

24. See Michel Foucault,TheHistoryof Sexuality,Vol.t:Anlntroduction (NewYork:Vintage, t976),t4o;and Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Colldge de France, r977-78 (New York:

Picador, zoog).

25. See Stephen j. Could, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, [t98t] t996).

26. A. Conan Doyle, "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: XXIV The Adventure of the Final Problem,"

Strand Magazine,Yol. 6, December t89,562.27. See in particular Paul Cross bnd Norman LeviIt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Lefi and lts

Quarrels with Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, r994), a book that attacked contemporarycritiques of science as political motivated.

28. SandraS.Phillips,"ldentifingtheCriminal,"inPolicePictures:ThePhotographasEvidence,ed.sandraS. Phillips (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art/Chronicle Books, r997), zo.

29. Allan Sekula, "The Body and the Archive," October39 (Winter r986): t9

3o. On the history of criminal identification and its techniques, see Simon Cole, Suspect ldentities:

A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal ldentfcation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

zooz); and Jonathan Finn, Capturing the Criminal lmage: From Mug Shot to Surueillance Society

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, zoog).

3r . l(elly Cates, Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and lhe Culture of Surueillance (NewYork: NewYork University Press, zott), t4.

32. Shoshana Magnet, When Biometrics Fail: Cender, Race, andtheTechnology of ldentity (Durham, NC:

Duke University Press, zorr); and Kelly Cates, "ldentifiing the 9/rr Faces of Terror: The Promise

and Problem ofFace Recognition," Cultural Studies zo, nos.4-5 fluly/September zoo6):417-40.

33. Lisa Cartwright, Screeningthe Body: Tracing Medicine's Visual Culture (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, t995), to9-37.

34. Cartwright, Screeninglhe Body, tt5-26.

35. Lesley Jacks on, From Atomsto Patterns: Crystal Structure Designsfrom the tg5t Festival ofBritain,The-- Story'of the Festival Pattern Croup (London: Richard Dennis Publications in association with the

Wellcome Collection, The Wellcome Trust, 2oo8).

36. See Janelle Sue Taylor, "The Public Fetus and the Family Car: From Abortion Politics to a Volvo

Advertisemenr," Public Culture 4, no. z (tg9z):67-8o; and Carol Stabile, "shooting the Mother:Fetal Photography and the Politics of Disappearance," Camera Obscura z8 \anuary t99z):179-2o5.

37. See Mary Catter, Katrina l(import, Diana Creene, TracyA. Weitz, and Ushma Upadhyay, "Relation-

ship Between Ultrasound Viewing and proceeding to Abortion," Obstetrics and Gynecology, tz3,

no. r (zor4): 8r-87; and discussion of this study in Katy Waldman, "Does Looking at UltrasoundBefore Abortion Change Women's Mindsl," Slate, lanuary g, 2014, http://www.slate.comlblogslxx_factor lzor4for /o9fu ltrasou nd-viewi ng-before-an-abortion-a-new-study-finds-that-for-a-small.html.

SCIENTIFIC LOOKINC, LOOKINC AI SCIENCE 375

that come to us through scientific research, and we give little thought to their

intricate design and cost. From the image of the anatomist at work to the photo-

graph that makes a fetus appear alive to the MRls and microscopic images that

render the body an aestheticized landscape to ads that sell science, the visual

culture of science is intricately intertwined with all other domains of our lives.

We may insist that science has a special place apart from the practices in which

we engage every day and that its modes of visuality should be interpreted on their

own terms, but we cannot ignore the immersion of science in the complexity ofthe everyday world and the web of practices and experiences that make scientificpractice ultimately inseparable from other domains of practice.

Notes

t. Susan Caidos, "Designer T Cells Emerge as Weapons Against Disease," Science News, May 3o,zor4, https://www.sciencenews.org/article/designer-t-cells-emerge-weapons-against-disease.

z. Dr. Susan Love in the mid-r99os criticized traditional cancer treatments, including surgery (slash),radiation (burn), and chemotherapy (poison), suggesting that we need to revamp how we character-ize cancer to find more effective scientific treatments. See Susan Bolotin, "Slash, Burn and Poison,"New York Times, April 13, 1997, https://www.nytimes.com/books 197 lo4lt3lreviews/97o4r 3.r 3bolotit.html.

3. "lmagine cancer cells as rehabilitable criminals, she would suggest; we need to change the environ-ment in order to change them," in Bolotin, "Slash, Burn and Poison."

4. Quantified Self group founder Cary Wolf notes that contemporary health culture focuses on this"one very important person: yourself"; see Emily Singer in "The Measured Sel[," Mlf TechnologyReview, June 21 , 2o11 , https://www.tech nologyreviewc om ls 1424390 llhe-measu red-life/

5. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (New York: Routledge,zotz), t59.

6. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: PantheonBooks, r97o).

7. lnt986 anotherVitruvianMandrawing,thoughttobetheworkofthearchitectCiacomoAndreadaFerrara, was found in a notebookthat is believed to predate Leonardo's. The idea thatthe humanbody is the world in miniature, an analog for the world itself, was "in the air" during Leonardo'stime. The metaphysical proposition about man's centrality to the universe was not his idea alone.See the Smithsonian article "The Other Vitruvian Man" at http://www.smithsonianmag.com/a rts-cu ltu re/the-oth er-vitruvi a n- man-t8833to41 .

8. ErwinPanofsky,'Artist,Scientist,Cenius: Notesonthe'RenaissanceDiimmerung,"'inTheRenais-sance: Six Essays, ed. Wallace K. Ferguson et al. and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York:Harper Torchbooks, t953), t4z.

9. ThereisalargeliteratureontheDaVinci anatomical andembryological drawings.See,forexample,Charles Donald O'Malley and John Bertrand de Cusance Morant Saunders, Leonardo da Vinci onthe Human Body (New York: Henry Shuman, r952); Leonardo (da Vinci), Kenneth David l(eele, andJane Roberts, Leonardo Da Vinci: Anatomical Drawings from the Royal Library, Windsor Casfle (NewYork: Metropolitan Museum ofArt, r983),78; and Martin Clayton and Ron Philo, Leonardo daVinci:Anatomist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, zorz). See also the classic work by Martin Kemp,Leonardo da Vinci: The MarvellousWorks of Nature and Man (London: Oxford, r98r, rev. ed. zooT);Daniel Arasse, Leonardo da Vinci, the Rhythm ofthe World (New York: Konecky, r 998); and Pietro C.Marani andMariaTeresaFiorio,eds, LeonardodaVinci:1452-151g (Milan:Skira,zor5).

ro. Jos6 Van Dijck, The Transparent Body: A Cultural Analysis of Medical lmaging (Seattle: University ofWashington Press, zoo5), 4.

rr. Julie V Hansen, "Resurrecting Death: Anatomical Art in the Cabinet of Dr. Frederik Ruysch," ArfBulletin 78, no. 4 (December t996): 663-79.

rz. Van Dijck, The Transparent Body, tzz.

t 3. Va nes sa R. Schwartz, " Pu b I ic Vi sits to the M orgue: FlAnerie in th e Service ofthe State, " in SpectacularRealities: Early Mass Culture in Fin'de-sidcle Pars (Berkeley: University of California Press, r998), 6o.

374 |SCIENIIFIC LOOKINC. LOOKINC AT SCIENCE

38. See, for instance, Rosalind Petchesky, "Fetal lmages: The Power ofVisual Culture in the Politicsof Reproduction," in Reproductive Technologies, ed. Michelle Stanforth (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, t987), 57-8o.

39. See valerie Hartouni, "containing women: Reproductive Discourse(s) in the r98os," in CulturalConceptions: On Reproductive Technologies and the Remaking of Lrp (Minneapolis: U niversity of M in-neapolis Press, r997), z6-5o.

40. Lennart Nilsson, AChild ls Born:The Drama of Life Before Birth (Newyork: Dell, r965); see alsoKaren Newman, Fetal Positions: lndividualism, Science, Visuality (Stanford, CA: Stanford UniversityPress, r996); and Mette Bryld and Nina Lykke, "From Rambo Sperm to Egg eueens: Two Versionsof Lennart Nilsson's Film on Human Reproduction," in Bits of Life: Femiikm at the lntersections ofMedia, Bioscience, and Technology, ed. Anneke Smelik and Nina Lykke (Seattle: University of Wash-ington Press, zoto), 79-93.

41. "3D and 4D Ultrasound During Pregnancy: Baby's First Photos," What to Expect, zo-t6, athllptl lwww.whattoexpect.com/pregna ncy I ultrasound3d-4d.

42. See Petchesky, "Fetal lmages"; and Stabile, "shootingthe Mother.,'

43. Joseph DumiI, Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans and Biomedical tdentity (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, zoo4), especially 6 and t63.

44. Norbert Weiner, Cybernetics: Or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cam-bridge, MA: MIT Press, r96r).

45. Donna J. Haraway, Modest-Witness@Second-Millennium. FemaleMan@-Meets-OncoMouserM(New York: Routledge, ry97), t58.

46' Alondra Nelson, Ihe Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation After the Cenome(Boston: Beacon Press, zor6).

47. Nelson, The Social Life of DNA, t64-65.

48. Lisa Funderburg, "The Changing Face ofAmerica," National ceographic, october zor3, photo-graphs by Martin Schoeller.

49 Michele Norris, "Visualizing Race, ldentity, and Change," Proof, September V, 2013, http:llproof .nationalgeographic.com I zot3 | o9 I t7 lvisualizing-change I

50. Ceoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Soriing Things Out: Classifcation and lts Consequences(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, r999).

5t. This passage is critically analyzed in Jennifer C onzAlez, "The Face and the Public: Race, Secrecy, andDigital Art Practice," in Between Humanities and the Digital, ed. Patrik Svensson and David TheoColdberg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, zor5), 441-56.

52. Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline first proposed the term in r96o to describe "self-regulatingman-machine systems," which theywere exploring in relation tothe rigors of spacetravel, with frn-damental aspects offeedback and homeostatis; Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline, "Cyborgsand Space," Astronautics (September r960), reprinted in The Cyborg Handbook, ed. Chris HablesCray (New York: Routledge, rygil,29-33.

53. Donna J. Haraway, "The Cyborg Manifesto," in Simians, Cyborgs, and women: The Reinvention ofNatnre (New York: Routledge, t g9t), t 49-8l.

54. Hartmut Bohnacker, Benedikt Cross, Julia Laub, and Claudius Lazzeroni, Generative Design: Visual-ize, Program, and Create with Processing (New York: Princeton Architectural press, zorz).

55. Joseph Dumit, Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Defne our Health (Durham, NC:Duke University Press, zorz).

56. Dumit, Drugsfor Lift,7z.

57. Dumit, Drugsfor Life,75.

58. Dumit, Drugsfor Life, t94.

59. Barbara Ehrenreich, "Welcome to Cancerland: A Mammogram Leads to a Cult of Pink Kitsch,"Harper's Magazine, November zoor, 43-53.

6o. S. Lochlann )ain, Malignant: How Cancer Becomes IJs (Berkeley: University of California Press, zor3);and S. Lochlann Jain, "Cancer Butch," Cultural Anthropology 22, no.4 (zoo7): 5or-38.

Further Reading

Balsamo, Anne. Technologies of the Gendered Body. Durham, NC: Duke University press, r 996.Berlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Coes to \X/ashington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, r997.

376 |SCIENTIFIC LOOKINC, LOOKINC AT SCIENCE

I

L

I

i

Cartwright, Lisa. Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine's Visual Culture. Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, t 995.

Carusi, Annamaria, Aud Sissel Hoel, Timothy Webmoor, and Steve Woolgar. Visualization in the Age

of Co m p uterizatiozr, N ew York: Routl ed ge, zor 4.

Coopmans, Catelijne, Janet Vertesi, Michael Lynch, and Steve Woolgar. Representation in Scientifc

Practice Revisited. Cambridge, MA: M lT Press, zot4.Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Calison. "The lmage of Objectivity." Representations 40 (1992)i81-128.

Davis-Floyd, Robbie, and Joseph Dumit, eds. Cyborg Babies: From Techno-Sex to Techno-Tots. New

York: Routledge, r998.Duden, Barbara. DisembodyingWomen: Perspectives on Pregnancy and the Unborn Translated by Lee

Hoinacki. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, r993.

Dumit, Joseph. Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans and Biomedical ldentity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton

U niversity Press, zoo4.Dumit, Joseph. Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Defne Our Health. Durham, NC'.

Duke University Press, zotz.Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of lnsanity in the Age of Reason. Translated by

Richard Howard. NewYork: Routledge, [r96r] zoor.Foucault, Michel.The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Translated by A. M.

Sheridan Smith. New York: Vintage, lt9Qlt994.Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon

Books, r 97o.Foucault, Michel.The History of Sexuality: An Introduction,Yol. r. Translated by Robert Hurley. New

York: Vintage, lt976l t 99o.Carland-Thomson, Rosemarie, ed. Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Ertraordinary Body. New York:

New York University Press, t997.

Carland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Staring: How \X/e Look. New York: Oxford University Press, zoo9.

Cates, Kelly. Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance. New

York: New York University Press, zott.Gilman, Sander L. Dffirence and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness' lthaca, NY:

Cornell University Press, r985. ....

Cilman,SanderL. Healthandtllness:lmagesofDffirence.Edinburgh,scotland: ReaktionBooks,rgg5.

Cilman, Sander L. lllness and Image: Case Studies in the Medical Humanities. Piscataway, NJ: Trans-

action, 2ol4.Cilman, Sander L. Seeingthe lnsane.Bratlleboro, VT: Echo Point Books and Media, zor4.

Cray, Chris Hables, ed. The Cyborg Handbook. New York: Routledge, r995.

Hammonds, Evelynn M. "New Technologies of Race." ln Processed Lives: Cender and Technology in

Everyday Life,edited byJenniferTerryand MelodieCalvert, to8-zr, NewYork: Routledge, r997.

Haraway, Donna J. Simians, Cyborgs, and women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge,

1991.

Haraway, Donna J. Modest-Witness@second-Millennium. FemaleMan@-Meets-oncoMouse'*.

New York: Routledge, r997.

Haraway, Donna J. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and lnfor-

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378 |SCIENTIFIC LOOKINC, LOOKINC AT SCIENCE

The Clobal FlowofVisual Culture

r h*pt*:r L*n

(,n.. the turn of the twenty-first century, images have moved around the

fJ globe with previously unimaginable speed. Today, images from all over the

globe seem to arrive effortlessly at our fingertips and on our screens. Yet the global

flow of images is subject to intense economic, legal, and political power strug-

gles. It is also subject to iilbate and regulation around mat- Ftc. r0.r

ters of taste and tradition. Not all human subjects everyvvhere The tnternetzo'r5, opre Project/

share or have an interest in the same images. Not everyong BarrettLyon, lulyrr,zor5(blue:

has devices through which to view make, or exchange images. North America' green: Europe'

purple: Latin America, red : Asia

lnternet access varies dramatically due to broadband penetra- Pacific, orange: Africa)

tion, access to and cost of technology and

connectivity, censorship, and conventions

and laws.

As we see in the Opte project graphic

reproduced here, global flows follow mul-

tiple routes, comprising a variegated infra-

structure. Routes of image transmission

are entangled with flows of data in other

areas of knowledge, life, and politics. This

chapter follows some of these disparate,

sometimes messy threads that make up the

global flow of images in the broader net-

work of digital globalization.

Struggles around image circulation

raise many questions, including who' in

the words of Nicholas Mirzoeff, should be

granted "the right to look."r In the context

I tts